English homophones
Yeung/Yonge/young
"Yeung" is a name; "young" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "Yeung" arrives as a name, while "young" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "Yeung" is 5 letters, "Yonge" is 5; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "Yeung" is 5 letters, "young" is 5; only the sound ties them.
- Shared stem "yo" then splits - "Yonge" (5 letters) vs "young" (5).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across Yeung, Yonge, young: gny. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
Yeung
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape VVVCC
Inventory egnuy · private eu
Yonge
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape VVCCV
Inventory egnoy · private eo
young
5 letters · 3 vowels · shape VVVCC
Inventory gnouy · private ou
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "Yeung" when you mean: A surname from Cantonese.
- Write "Yonge" when you mean: A surname.
- Write "young" when you mean: In the early part of growth or life; born not long ago.
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 3-spelling cluster (Yeung, Yonge, young). Here's where to go from here.
- "young" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #364 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: ya · yah · yuh. 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.