Homophones by Vowel Sound

One of the easiest and most effective ways to remember the pronunciation of difficult words is to match them to words that are spelled differently but are said the same way. The list below is organised by vowel sound to make it easy to find homophones, and to help teachers design lessons on difficult sounds. As the correct (phonemic) symbols for the vowel sounds might be unknown or not show up on your computer, we have used our own system to show the vowel sounds and put them in order:

The pairs of homophones are in alphabetical order, and so are the words in each vowel sound section. Note that some of the pairs of words (for example where and wear) are not homophones in all varieties of English.