What Are Homophones?

Homophones are words that have exactly the same sound (pronunciation) but different meanings and (usually) spelling.

For example, the following two words have the same sound, but different meanings and spelling: hour / our

In the next example, the two words have the same sound and spelling, but different meanings: bear (the animal) / bear (to carry)

Usually homophones are in groups of two (our, hour), but very occasionally they can be in groups of three (to, too, two) or even four. If we take our "bear" example, we can add another word to the group

bare (naked) / bear (the animal) / bear (to tolerate)

> "Our bear cannot bear to be bare at any hour."


http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/homophones-what.htm

A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as 'rose' (flower) and 'rose' (past tense of "rise"), or differently, such as 'carat', 'caret', and 'carrot', or 'to', 'two', and 'too'. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms. Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs. The term "homophone" may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, such as phrases, letters or groups of letters that are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter or group of letters.

The word derives from the Greek homo- (ὁμο-), "same", and phōnḗ (φωνή), "voice, utterance". The opposite is heterophone: similar, but not phonetically identical words.

In wordplay and games:
Homophones are often used to create puns and to deceive the reader (as in crossword puzzles) or to suggest multiple meanings. The last usage is common in poetry and creative literature. An example of this is seen in Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood: "The shops in mourning" where mourning can be heard as mourning or morning. Another vivid example is Thomas Hood's use of 'birth' & 'berth' and "told' & 'toll'd' (tolled) in his poem "Faithless Sally Brown":

"His death, which happen'd in his berth,
At forty-odd befell:
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll'd the bell."

In some accents, various sounds have merged in that they are no longer distinctive, and thus words that differ only by those sounds in an accent that maintains the distinction (a minimal pair) are homophonous in the accent with the merger. Some examples from English are:

- 'pin' and 'pen' in many southern American accents.
- 'merry', 'marry', and 'Mary' in most American accents.
- The pairs 'do', 'due' and 'forward', 'foreword' are homophonous in most American accents but not in most British accents.
- The pairs 'talk', 'torque', and 'court', 'caught' are distinguished in rhotic accents such as Scottish English and most dialects of American English, but are homophones in many non-rhotic accents such as British Received Pronunciation.

Homophones of multiple words or phrases (as sometimes seen in word games) are also known as "oronyms". This term was coined by Gyles Brandreth and first published in his book The Joy of Lex (1980), and it was used in the BBC programme "Never Mind the Full Stops", which also featured Brandreth as a guest.

Examples of "oronyms" (which may only be true homophones in certain dialects of English) include:

"ice cream" vs. "I scream" (as in the popular song "I scream. You scream. We all scream for ice cream.")
"euthanasia" vs. "Youth in Asia"
"depend" vs. "deep end"
"the sky" vs. "this guy" (most notably as a mondegreen in Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix)
"four candles" vs. "fork handles"
"sand which is there" vs. "sandwiches there"
"example" vs. "egg sample"
"some others" vs. "some mothers"
"night rain" vs. "night train"
"minute" vs. "my newt"
"Long Island" vs. "lawn guy land"
"real eyes, realize, real lies"

In his Appalachian comedy routine, American comedian Jeff Foxworthy frequently uses oronyms which play on exaggerated "country" accents. Notable examples include:

Initiate: "My wife ate two sandwiches, initiate [and then she ate] a bag o' tater chips."
Mayonnaise: "Mayonnaise [Man, there is] a lot of people here tonight."
Innuendo: "Hey dude I saw a bird fly innuendo [in your window]."
Moustache: "I Moustache [must ask] you a question..."

Malapropisms, which often create a similar comic effect, are usually near-homophones.