English homophones
tough/tuff
"tough" is an adjective; "tuff" 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: "tough" arrives as an adjective, while "tuff" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "tough" is 5 letters, "tuff" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across tough, tuff: tu. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
tough
5 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVCC
Inventory ghotu · private gho
tuff
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory ftu · private f
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "tough" when you mean: Strong and resilient; sturdy.
- Write "tuff" when you mean: A light porous rock, now especially a rock composed of compacted volcanic ash varying in size from fine sand to coarse gravel.
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 (tough, tuff). Here's where to go from here.
- "tough" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #1,777 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: thrown · throne. 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.