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Volume 1 Issue 2
Article 1

Article: Homophone-obia

Author: Linda Truss

Bio: Linda Truss (BA Arts) honours in psychology - has previously worked with youngsters whose first language is an aboriginal dialect. She’s also enjoyed watching various remedial and home-schooled students develop a love for learning through her “puzzle-pit-stop” approach to English. While her career is currently on hold due to family commitments, down the track she hopes to get involved in teaching English as a second language to adults.

(Optional information)
Linda has produced a range of English teaching resources including a dictionary of homophones, and a number of sets of black-line masters under the Puzzle-pit-stop umbrella. If you’d like other sample puzzles or further information about her Puzzle-pit-stop series you can email her at linda.garyand@gmail.com

The enclosed puzzles have not been published anywhere else, but please drop me an email or the equivalent to a tear sheet if you do use them. Thanks. Linda.

Homophones are two or more words which sound the same when spoken aloud but are spelt differently in English.

Your students (or even you!) might think that no one needs to memorize homophones now there are computers – right? Hmmm …

Type out the following two sentences onto your computer …

The sweat pawed from my pours as the pore lion raised his pores. “Pour me!” I gulped.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, the chances are it has not picked up there is anything wrong with the sentences. Nothing is underlined in red as misspelled. Nor is anything underlined in green to alert you to the fact that you might have used the wrong words in the wrong places. From the computer’s point of view the sentence is correct. But is it?

Now reconsider the sentence …

The sweat poured from my pores as the poor lion raised his paws. “Poor me!” I gulped.

This time a little green squiggle appears under “Poor me!” – Nope! Not a spelling error but a gentle hint to “consider revising” the statement because it’s a sentence fragment.

The question is – which sentence reflects to the reader (or maybe a potential employer) that the writer has a good command of English? In case you didn’t pick it, the first sentence has used the wrong word in five places!

Confused? You’re not alone. (Or is that your not alone … hmm maybe it’s yaw not alone … or it could even be yore not alone …) If you’re not sure you need to sort out your homophones. At least you need to sort them out until the computer programmers get smart enough to help computers recognize them!

Few people like tests, but most people find puzzles a lot less threatening.

I’m told that modern acrostic crosswords were first invented by Mrs Elisabeth Kingsley. Returning to her old school, she was unimpressed by how little everyone knew about classical English and American poets and prose masters, and so she decided to make a game of learning about them.

I hope you enjoy sharing the following homophone puzzles with your English students.

There’s a word for it …

The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary seems to be “floccinaucinihilipilification”, meaning the action or habit of estimating something as worthless!

Word Ways (May 1980) printed the full name for the protein
Bovine glutamate dehydrogenase. It has 3641 letters!

Dr Edward Strother characterized the spa waters of Bristol as
“Aquaeosalinocalcarinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic”

And today’s ridiculous word is ...

To solve this puzzle think of a homophone for each of the words listed below and then write them into the boxes. The first homophone is written in to get you on your way. After you have filled in all the boxes, write down the letters in the shaded boxes in order (1-12) to discover a ridiculous sounding word you can call someone you know who is “addicted to complaining!”

Someone addicted to complaining is.... Q _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _