Homophones and Homographs: An American Dictionary, 3D Ed.

By James B. Hobbs

Book Overview

This expanded third edition defines and cross-references 7,870 homophones and 1,554 homographs (up from 7,000 and 1,400 in the 2d ed.). As the most comprehensive compilation of American homophones (words that sound alike) and homographs (look-alikes), this latest edition serves well where even the most modern spell-checkers and word processors fail--although rain, reign, and rein may be spelled correctly, the context in which these words may appropriately be used is not obvious to a computer.

• Format: Library Binding
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786406100
• ISBN13: 9780786406104
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: McFarland & Company
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.1" x 10.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

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.