English homophones
sky/Skye
"sky" is a noun; "Skye" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "sky" arrives as a noun, while "Skye" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "sky" then splits - "sky" (3 letters) vs "Skye" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sky, Skye: ksy. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sky
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCV
Inventory ksy · no private letters vs siblings
Skye
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVV
Inventory eksy · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sky" when you mean: The atmosphere above a given point, especially as visible from the surface of the Earth as the place where the sun, moon, stars, and clou…
- Write "Skye" when you mean: Ellipsis of Isle of Skye, a large island in Scotland.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- Skye ← ksye · skey · skkye · skyye · sskye · syke
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (sky, Skye). Here's where to go from here.
- "sky" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,968 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: some · sum. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.