English homophones
sleight/slight
"sleight" is a noun; "slight" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "sleight" arrives as a noun, while "slight" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "sl" then splits - "sleight" (7 letters) vs "slight" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sleight, slight: ghilst. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sleight
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVVCCC
Inventory eghilst · private e
slight
6 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVCCC
Inventory ghilst · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sleight" when you mean: Cunning; craft; artful practice.
- Write "slight" when you mean: Minor; small in amount
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (sleight, slight). Here's where to go from here.
- "slight" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #4,982 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: SNP · snip. 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.