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  • Ahoy! You...tube.

  • [laughs]

  • There's going to be some word play today. I hope you got your noses strapped on

  • A few days ago I put out a tweet

  • where I

  • gave some facts about words that sound the same,

  • but have different meanings,

  • like "blue" and "blew".

  • "Blue" the colour, and "blew" the past tense of blow.

  • A few people responded with, "yea yea yea, they're called homonyms."

  • Fair enough.

  • "Blue" and "blew" are homonyms.

  • ....... or are they?

  • There's a reason I didn't call them homonyms, and that reason will be made clear in today's episode.

  • Let's look at three ways two or more words can be similar.

  • They can have the same meaning,

  • they can be spelled the same, or they can be sound the same when spoken.

  • If two words mean the same thing,

  • but are pronounced differently and have different spellings,

  • well then they're just.... synonyms.

  • Synonyms, we've all heard of synonyms before.

  • An example of synonyms would be

  • "Buy"

  • and "Purchase". These two words

  • have nearly the same meaning, I'll admit that they probably can have different connotations,

  • like maybe "Buy" is more casual and "Purchase" is more fancy.

  • *posh voice* "Oh you bought that, but i purchased it hehe because I'm an adult"

  • Any who, they nearly have the same meaning so they are synonyms.

  • For those of you who love little fun facts

  • It often comes up, is there a synonym for synonym?

  • Not really, but there is a slightly outdated word that isn't used very often.

  • It looks like a poe-cil-onym,

  • but really this is pronounced pe-cil-onym.

  • pecilonym (pronounced) poecilonym (spelling)

  • It's a good spelling bee word because it's not spelt the way it sounds. Poecilonym

  • and poecilonym means various names, various names for the same thing... synonyms.

  • Poecilonym is a synonym for synonym there you go, fun fact of the day *slot machine winning sound*

  • But we're not done.

  • What if two or more words mean the same thing and are spelled the same but aren't pronounced alike?

  • Now we don't really have a word for what those are called, but lets come up with some examples.

  • "The" and "The" (pronounced "Thee")

  • They are two ways of pronouncing English's only definite article, so they mean the same thing

  • however increasingly in American-English especially

  • "Thee" is being used for emphasis, which tentatively gives it a different meaning.

  • So "The" and "Thee" might not be like a totally perfect example all the time

  • sometimes just accent differences can matter, like how I might say "about" and a Canadian might say "aboot"

  • right, they're spelled the same and they mean the same thing but they sound differently.

  • Ok what about things that mean the same thing and sound the same but are spelled differently, well these are just spelling variants

  • For instance, um "Barbecue" spelled like "bar-ba-cue" with a "C", and "Barbeque" spelled like this with a "Q"

  • Ooh ah, "Barbecue" is not spelt like that it's spelt with an "E"

  • This is just me words and all, you're welcome

  • Using a "C" or a "Q" doesn't effect the meaning or the sound of the word it's just a spelling difference

  • There are two words that also fit into this category that I'm particularly fond of

  • "Diarrhoea" and "Diarrhea"

  • There's a fantastic uh mnemonic or acronym that you can use to remember how to spell diarrhoea in the UK fashion

  • The mnemonic is, Dash In A Real Rush Hurry or Else Accident!

  • Diarrhoea. Now because I'm in the US we don't always use that "O" so I just remember the mnemonic and then I erase the "O"

  • Diarrhea

  • Perfect, diarrhea is a great example of what might fit into this intersection in our Venn diagram

  • Ok, now lets look in the very middle of our Venn diagram. If two words are spelled the same, are pronounced the same, and have the same meaning.

  • Well then they are just identical words

  • an example would be "soup" and "soup"

  • both sound the same, spelled the same, and refer to the soup

  • Not so fun, so lets keep moving on. What we have left are these two circles where words either are spelled the same

  • look the same written down or they sound the same to the ear when spoken

  • so the differences are between the way they sound, "Phone" And the way they look, "Graph"

  • Ok

  • So lets think about words that sound the same but have different meanings and are not spelled the same

  • Um oh that would be something like what I tweeted

  • "Blue"

  • and "Blew"

  • What distinguishes them is that they look (graph) different (hetero)

  • so they are heterogrpahs

  • Now what about words that sound different and mean different things but are spelled the same

  • Examples of these would be things like

  • "tear"

  • and "tear"

  • If you "tear" apart something I love you might cause me to shed a "tear"

  • Uh another example is, "Record and "Record"

  • We can "record" what I'm doing right now, if we do so what we will have made is a "record" of what I did

  • What distinguishes them is that they have different (hetero) sounds (phones)

  • they are heterophones

  • Ok so we have these two differences, heterographs look different, heterophones sound different

  • In the middle of these two we have words that look the same and sound the same but have different meanings

  • like "Bank" "Bank" or "Skate" "Skate"

  • A bank can either be where money is stored or it can be the kind of sloping land near a river, the bank of a river

  • you wouldn't go get a lone from a river bank, haha

  • and you wouldn't go fish in a financial bank

  • Skate, "Skate" means to either slide along but it's also the name of a kind of flat fish

  • Those words have a very special name, if you want to be really precise

  • Only words that fall within this part of the Venn diagram are homonyms, same name

  • Because they sound the same and they're spelled the same

  • but we can go into even more detail because both of these homonyms "Bank" and "Bank", and "Skate" and "Skate"

  • aren't equal, one is a true homonym

  • and the other

  • is polysemous

  • heh yea

  • polysemous means many meanings

  • if two different meanings of a word share the same origin like the mouth of a river and the mouth of a human

  • then they are polysemous, but if two words do not have a shared origin but still sound and look the alike well

  • then their homonymity is quite special, it's true

  • There are two other categories we can draw here

  • one involves words that are spelled the same and that's not only include heterophones but also homonyms

  • so I'm going to draw an outline that includes heterophones and homonyms

  • Ok now this little piece of the Venn diagram, these are words that look the same. They are what are called

  • Homographs

  • Oh my gosh I'm running out of room, homographs

  • well anyways you guys, you get it you guys are smart. Homogrpahs

  • Notice that I'm not including words that have the same meaning, they're pretty much just variations of the same

  • word and they don't get a special name

  • Homographs look the same, so "Bank" "Bank", "Skate" "Skate", "Tear" "Tear", "Record" "Record" they all look the same

  • But there's another category which also includes homonyms

  • as well as

  • Heterographs

  • These words sound the same so as you can probably imagine they are called homophones

  • I don't know how well the silver shows up, but both heterographs and homonyms sound the same, they have the same sound

  • "Skate" "Skate", "Blue" "Blew" other examples of heterographs would be like "To" "Too" and "Two"

  • Now often when people talk about homonyms what they're really talking about are homophones and that's

  • fine which definition of homonym you prefer to use or want to use at a given moment is totally up to you, I don't care

  • as long as it's clear what you mean that's perfect, I'm a language descriptionist I think language is how

  • we use it I don't want to prescribe rules of usage onto people

  • but finally we should talk about. Visemes

  • Visemes are words that have different meanings, are spelled differently, and sound different but yet have

  • something very special in common they look the same on the lips

  • Visemes are words that are difficult to distinguish when lip reading because the way your mouth moves

  • and the tongue and the inside of your mouth are similar

  • some of my favorite examples are "Pet", "Bell", and "Men"

  • in fact we're going to turn the audio off and I'm going to say three of them in some order and I want you in the

  • comments below tell me what order you think I said them in

  • (Not sure what order he did them in)

  • There you go. Alright finally learn more I've got two videos to recommend that are down in the description

  • one, is about the McGurk Effect, if you've never seen the McGurk effect which ties lip movements into sound

  • and the audio illusion that emerges you got to check it out

  • Also Tom 7 who I've talked about in a Vsauce 1 video in the past

  • has a great video out about a thing he's invented called "Anagraphs". Anagraphs are words that don't share letters they share

  • letter pieces, it's a fantastic video that's linked below check that one out. While we're talking about nyms

  • names for words uh I want to talk about somethings that aren't going to show up on this chart

  • um the opposite of a synonym is an antonym, words that have opposite meanings, like hot and cold

  • Boring right? What I'm fascinated by are autoantonyms, a word that can also mean the opposite of one of it's meanings

  • an example would be the word "Off", off can both mean to activate and deactivate, as in my alarm went off so I turned it off

  • "Left" is another good autoanonym left can mean gone like he left but left can also mean he didn't leave

  • he's left

  • There are also autoanonymic phrases like "Wind up" wind up can mean get ready like a wind up for a pitch

  • but it can also mean we gotta stop

  • "We gotta wind up", we're out of time

  • and as always

  • Thanks for watching

Ahoy! You...tube.

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