English homophones
whoa/woe
"whoa" is an intj; "woe" 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: "whoa" arrives as an intj, while "woe" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "whoa" is 4 letters, "woe" is 3; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across whoa, woe: ow. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
whoa
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CCVV
Inventory ahow · private ah
woe
3 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVV
Inventory eow · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "whoa" when you mean: Stop (especially when commanding a horse or imitative thereof); calm down; slow down.
- Write "woe" when you mean: Great sadness or distress; a misfortune causing such sadness.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
- whoa ← hwoa · whao · whhoa · woha · wwhoa
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (whoa, woe). Here's where to go from here.
- "whoa" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #9,421 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: what · watt. 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.