Homographs, from a lexicographer's POV

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Wendalyn Nichols wrote:

#What Lesa says is almost right: "homonym" is indeed an umbrella term (a
#hypernym, if you will); but "homographs" are simply words that are spelled
#the same whether they sound the same or not, and "homophones" sound the
#same whether they are spelled the same or not.
#
#A list of words that have the same spelling but different pronunciations
#would still be a list of homographs; just be aware that word X doesn't have
#to have a different pronunciation from word Y to qualify as a homograph of
#word Y.

This is not the first time this terminological question has come up. I
have sometimes called such words "heterophones". True, analytically that
would mean 'expressions that are pronounced differently', and the
completely transparent term would be "heterophonic homograph", or vice
versa "homographic heterophone". But since

 1. there's an evident need for a term with the former meaning, and

 2. I don't see any demand for a term meaning just 'expressions that are
pronounced differently' (which applies to almost all pairs of
expressions in any language),

I hereby propose "heterophone" tout court.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania