English homophones
toad/towed
"toad" is a noun; "towed" 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: "toad" arrives as a noun, while "towed" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "to" then splits - "toad" (4 letters) vs "towed" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across toad, towed: dot. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
toad
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory adot · private a
towed
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCVC
Inventory deotw · private ew
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "toad" when you mean: An amphibian, a kind of frog (order Anura) with shorter hindlegs and a drier, wartier skin, many in family Bufonidae.
- Write "towed" when you mean: simple past and past participle of tow
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 (toad, towed). Here's where to go from here.
- "towed" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #17,737 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: titan · tighten. 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.