English homophones
war/wor/wore
"war" is a noun; "wor" is a determiner - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "war" arrives as a noun, while "wor" is a determiner. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "war" is 3 letters, "wor" is 3; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "war" is 3 letters, "wore" is 4; only the sound ties them.
- Shared stem "wor" then splits - "wor" (3 letters) vs "wore" (4).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across war, wor, wore: rw. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
war
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory arw · private a
wor
3 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVC
Inventory orw · private o
wore
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory eorw · private eo
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "war" when you mean: Organized, large-scale, armed conflict between countries or between national, ethnic, or other sizeable groups, usually but not always in…
- Write "wor" when you mean: Our.
- Write "wore" when you mean: simple past of wear
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- wore ← owre · woer · worre · wroe · wwore
Each spelling
noun · /wɔː/ · #332 frequency
Organized, large-scale, armed conflict between countries or between national, ethnic, or other sizeable groups, usually but not always involving active engagement of military forces.
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 3-spelling cluster (war, wor, wore). Here's where to go from here.
- "war" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #332 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: whale · wail · wale. 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.