English homophones
watt/what
"watt" is a noun; "what" is a determiner - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "watt" arrives as a noun, while "what" is a determiner. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "watt" is 4 letters, "what" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across watt, what: atw. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
watt
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory atw · no private letters vs siblings
what
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CCVC
Inventory ahtw · private h
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "watt" when you mean: In the International System of Units, the derived unit of power; the power of a system in which one joule of energy is transferred per se…
- Write "what" when you mean: Which, especially which of an open-ended set of possibilities.
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 (watt, what). Here's where to go from here.
- "what" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #46 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: we'll · wheel. 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.