Homophones are distinct from homonyms (two words spelled the same way but with different meanings).There are many lists of homophones on the internet, most of which are designed for children. One of the most useful is the English Club's education list (http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/homophones.htm), since they maintain several different lists designed for children in different grades.
. Homophone.com also maintains a long list (http://www.homophone.com/). The Five J's site provides a homophone list in a pdf file (http://fivejs.com/homeschool-downloads/homophones-list/), which may be easier to print and distribute. For children who prefer to learn through song, PBS broadcasting wrote a song designed to teach kids about homophones - Brian McKnight sings it with Cleo the Lion. The video is available for free from the PBS website (http://pbskids.org/lions/videos/homophones.html).Some homophones are only pronounced the same way in some dialects; depending on a person's pronunciation of certain vowels, words like "caught" (caught the ball) and "cot" (slept on a cot) or "Mary" (the name), "merry" (the feeling) and marry (the verb describing a wedding). The "Mary" "marry" "merry" homophone is quite common in North America, where many dialects pronounce all there the same way, except in the American South, where "marry" is pronounced differently than "merry"/"Mary." All three words are pronounced differently in most British accents, however, so they are not considered homophones in the United Kingdom. In fact, words that are homophones in some dialects and not in others are often used by linguists to place accents and dialects "" knowing how a person pronounces "caught" vs "cot," "furry" vs "fairy" and "knotty" vs "knotty" can allow a linguist to place that person's childhood residence fairly accurately!Many homophone lists don't include some or all of the dialect-specific homophones, so a list of dialect-dependent homophones may also be useful to children. The open content dictionary Wiktionary maintains a list of dialect-dependent homophones (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_dialect-dependent_homophones), which is one of the only free resources of its type. Unfortunately, many of the descriptions use linguistics terms, which are not child-friendly, but the word list remains useful.Some homophones include words with different language origins that are sometimes used in the same language. Since English language books often include some words from other languages like French and German, there are some dual-language homophones that may also puzzle children, like "oui" (the French word for yes) and "we" or "carte" (as in the French a la carte, a phrase often used in English) and "cart." These may or may not appear on homophone lists, depending on their completeness. Words like these are sometimes called "false friends," because a person may assume that they mean similar things in the two languages when they are in fact quite different. Bruce MacFarlane maintains a list (http://www.translation-language.org/falsefriends.htm) of false friends in multiple languages. More reference links: http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/homophones.htm http://fivejs.com/homeschool-downloads/homophones-list/
