English homophones
soar/sore
"soar" is a verb; "sore" 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: "soar" arrives as a verb, while "sore" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "so" then splits - "soar" (4 letters) vs "sore" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across soar, sore: ors. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
soar
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory aors · private a
sore
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory eors · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "soar" when you mean: To fly high with little effort, like a bird.
- Write "sore" when you mean: Causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive.
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 (soar, sore). Here's where to go from here.
- "sore" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #7,289 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: sign · sine. 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.