English homophones
sone/sown
"sone" is a noun; "sown" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "sone" arrives as a noun, while "sown" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "so" then splits - "sone" (4 letters) vs "sown" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sone, sown: nos. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sone
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory enos · private e
sown
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory nosw · private w
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sone" when you mean: a subjective unit of loudness for an average listener equal to the loudness of a 1000-hertz sound that has an intensity 40 decibels above…
- Write "sown" when you mean: past participle of sow
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 (sone, sown). Here's where to go from here.
- "sown" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #30,976 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: says · sez. 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.