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What do you call two unrelated words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently? Kind of an anti-homonym. (anti-homophone for you youngsters)

I've been listening to fanfix generated with a text to speech program I bought. I'm constantly having to edit words phonetically to get the pronunciation correct. Here are a few examples:

Polish (related to the country), polish (to shine)
wind (air movement), wind (to crank)
wound (injury), wound (to twist)
secreted (to exude), secreted (to hide)


OK, so I know there has got to be a word for this. Does anyone know what it is?


Shallowford
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From my quick research homonym is the correct term.


Morgana

A writer's job is to think of new plots and create characters who stay with you long after the final page has been read. If that mission is accomplished than we have done what we set out to do, which is to entertain and hopefully educate.
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Heteronyms.

- Linguist Lynn

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Just learned my fact of the day. I understood "homonym" to be the same as "homophone" from my school days so I never thought to look it up.

This is one of the alternate meanings for "homonym". "Heteronym" and "homograph" are less ambiguous terms for the same concept.

Thank you both.


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The terms "heteronym" and "homograph" are not synonymous. The latter refers to any two words with the same spelling and different meanings. Heteronyms are a proper subset of homographs. Heteronyms are hoomographs that also have different pronunciations. Your examples are both heteronyms and homographs. An example of a pair of terms that are homographs but not heteronyms would be (river) "bank" and (financial) "bank." They are spelled and pronounced the same way, but they have different meanings.

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Thanks for the explanation Lynn. So, it's the heteronyms that have been giving the computer pronounciation fits.

English makes sense but I'm kind of glad I work in the sciences.



Shallowford

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