The English language may be complex, but it offers users an expansive vocabulary. The benefit of that isn’t the ability to impress people with five-syllable words; it’s the remarkable precision that all those words make possible.
But English also has convoluted rules of phonetics. And one place people – including professional writers – tend to get tripped up is in the area of homonyms. If your memories of third grade have become a bit hazy, homonyms are words that sound alike, but are spelled differently. More important, they have vastly different meanings – and your trusty spellchecker isn’t smart enough to recognize whether you’ve chosen the right one.
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