Homophones and Homographs: An American Dictionary

By James B. Hobbs

Book Overview

Reviews of the first edition: The best roster of these phenomena--Wilson Library Bulletin; a good choice for any library--RQ. Now greatly expanded, the second edition includes over 7,000 (up from 3,500) homophones (words that sound alike) and over 1,400 (up from 600) homographs (look-alikes). Words are defined and cross referenced.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 089950776X
• ISBN13: 9780899507767
• Release Date: May 1993
• Publisher: McFarland Publishing
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A delightful and useful book

This is a delightful and useful book. At least three kinds of people should buy it:(1) People in computational linguistics and natural language processing. If you work in speech recognition, you need homophones to test (or illustrate challenges for) speech recognition systems. If you work in natural language processing, you need homographs to test your system's ability to handle lexical ambiguity. This book is a great source for both.(2) People in phonetics and sociolinguistics. If you do experimental work in these fields, you want lots of minimal pairs. Although they're not labelled as such, this book will point you towards lots of minimal pairs for flapping, glide raising, and other phonological phenomena of English.(3) People interested in the English language in general. I came across lots of interesting and cool words in here, and enjoy just flipping through this book.In addition, the book is beautifully printed and bound. I would have expected it to cost a lot more.