English homophones
Taurus/torus
"Taurus" is a name; "torus" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "Taurus" arrives as a name, while "torus" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "Taurus" is 6 letters, "torus" is 5; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across Taurus, torus: rstu. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
Taurus
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVC
Inventory arstu · private a
torus
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCVC
Inventory orstu · private o
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "Taurus" when you mean: A constellation of the zodiac traditionally figured in the shape of a bull and containing the star Aldebaran.
- Write "torus" when you mean: The standard representation of such a space in 3-dimensional Euclidean space: a surface or solid formed by rotating a closed curve, espec…
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
name · /ˈtɔːɹəs/ · #21,092 frequency
A constellation of the zodiac traditionally figured in the shape of a bull and containing the star Aldebaran.
noun · /ˈtɔː.ɹəs/ · #49,104 frequency
The standard representation of such a space in 3-dimensional Euclidean space: a surface or solid formed by rotating a closed curve, especially a circle, about a line which lies in the same plane but does not intersect it (e.g. like a ring doughnut).
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (Taurus, torus). Here's where to go from here.
- "Taurus" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #21,092 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: Thor · thaw. 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.