What Are Homophones?

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings (ate and eight, for example). It is important for our students to be able to use the correct word in their writing!

List of Homophones

See this extensive list for hundreds of common homophones.

In order to make this list as useful as possible, words that are archaic, slang, naughty, or extremely uncommon have not been included.

Teaching Homophones

Students often find homophones interesting and it can be fun teaching them! You may like to teach them as they come up in everyday spelling and reading, or you may prefer to teach them directly. Some kids like to use worksheets—my daughter did. This free workbook provides practice for 40 of the most common homophones.

And some kids really dislike worksheets! For those kids, try some of these other methods of teaching:

• When a spelling word has a homophone, point it out to your student and have him add it to his own personal list.

• Take turns making up sentences that contain pairs of homophones—the sillier, the better. "The toad towed the car." "Wait here while I check the elephant's weight."

• Concentrate on the most important pairs first. The ones needed most often in writing include ad/add, ant/aunt, ate/eight, be/bee, blew/blue, buy/by/bye, hear/here, hour/our, its/it's, know/no, one/won, their/there/they're, theirs/there's, to/too/two, who's/whose, and your/you're.

• Point out a pair of homophones, such as rose/rows, and ask a question such as "Which word means a flower?"

• My favorite idea is to find two pictures, like those at the top of the page. Ask the student to match a picture with the WRONG word, instead of the right word. After the student has correctly matched each picture with the wrong word, ask him to match it with the correct one. Pictures add fun to the whole activity.

Short, interesting sessions teach more than long, boring ones, so make them memorable!

I can still remember the day I first found out about homophones. My second grade teacher had a small collection of books in the back of the classroom. After we were done with our work we could choose a book and bring it back to our desk. Well, one day I discovered a book that had pairs of homophones. It was the first time I realized that there were such things, and my pulse quickened. The thrill of such knowledge! I read that book over and over, and to this day I still like these pairs of words!

As teachers—of our own children or a classroom of children—let's take each opportunity to instill a love of learning. There are no "small things" when it comes to teaching.