English homophones
thou/yow
"thou" is a pronoun; "yow" 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: "thou" arrives as a pronoun, while "yow" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "thou" is 4 letters, "yow" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across thou, yow: o. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
thou
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVV
Inventory hotu · private htu
yow
3 letters · 2 vowels · shape VVC
Inventory owy · private wy
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "thou" when you mean: Nominative singular of ye (“you”).
- Write "yow" when you mean: Alternative form of yowe.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- thou ← htou · thhou · thuo · tohu · tthou
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (thou, yow). Here's where to go from here.
- "thou" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #5,558 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: their · they're. 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.