English homophones
teas/tease/Tees
"teas" is a noun; "tease" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "teas" arrives as a noun, while "tease" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "teas" then splits - "teas" (4 letters) vs "tease" (5).
- Shared stem "te" then splits - "teas" (4 letters) vs "Tees" (4).
- Shared stem "te" then splits - "tease" (5 letters) vs "Tees" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across teas, tease, Tees: est. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
teas
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory aest · private a
tease
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCV
Inventory aest · private a
Tees
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory est · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "teas" when you mean: plural of tea
- Write "tease" when you mean: To separate the fibres of (a fibrous material).
- Write "Tees" when you mean: A hamlet in Alberta, Canada.
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 3-spelling cluster (teas, tease, Tees). Here's where to go from here.
- "tease" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #13,253 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: tie · Thai · Ty. 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.