Homophones: Sound-Alike Impediments to Effective Communication

“A powerful agent is the right word.”

Mark Twain

Essay on William Dean Howells

(1906)

A forty-ate-year-old elicit drug user named lues complains that the heals and souls of her feat or soar. On examination, she has facial hare, a subtle neck, crooked knows, hemorrhages in her write optic fungus, course skin and mental contusion as in mixed edema, split pea to on oscillation, rite-cited plural affusion, descended abdomen with cirrus fluid in her perineal cavity, shoddy lymphadenopathy, tender mussels, normal refluxes, and venus insufficiency in both legs. Her doctor diagnoses virile inflection. Wood ewe?

If you could not see this case description but heard it presented at a medical conference or as part of a lecture, you probably would have little or no difficulty understanding the gist of it. But when you read it without first having heard it, you are momentarily confused, and perhaps even shocked and irritated, by so many words that look incorrect to your eye but sound correct to your ear. Such incongruity is typical of misused homophones—words that sound alike but differ fundamentally in meaning, origin, and spelling.

To satisfy our curiosity and to challenge our minds, we decided to document as many homophones as we could by poring (not pouring) over several standard English-language dictionaries. After only a few days, we had compiled 440 homophones. We then decided to search specifically for medical homophones. This time, however, we looked solely online, using “medical homophones” as the search words. That decision proved fruitful and time-saving, because we found more than we could handle, quickly and effortlessly. See Table I for some of the medical and non-medical “sound-alikes” that we assembled.

TABLE I. Illustrative Homophones

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In everyday conversation, the incorrect use of homophones can readily escape recognition. As an example, take the word foreword. Notice how much it sounds like forward, four-word, and four-ward. Even the spellings are similar, but the resemblances stop there. When written, however, these words are easy to differentiate. Likewise, the incorrect use of homophones in manuscripts submitted for publication is easy to spot. And, depending on the reviewers’ and editors’ tolerance of sloppy writing (which too often indicates sloppy thinking), bad word choices by themselves can be a reason for rejecting the manuscript.

Why emphasize homophones? First of all, words form language, language enables communication, and communication is our link with each other. Without effective communication, marriages fail, businesses fold, and education falters. And in medicine, poor communication fosters poor patient care, sometimes with fatal outcomes. So paying attention to sound-alikes can reduce or eliminate their inappropriate use. It can also improve your spelling, increase your vocabulary, strengthen your knowledge, and protect you against mental inertia.