This handy book will be invaluable to English language learners and their teachers. It will also serve as a quick reference for writers and copy editors, as a supplement to dictionaries for anyone who needs to look up a word, and as a source for word puzzle fans. Homophones are words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Here are more than 600 homophone pairs, listed alphabetically, each with its own brief definition and part-of-speech designation. Some homophones are easy to distinguish?"ate" and "eight", for instance. Others can cause common spelling errors or confused meaning?for example, apprise, which means to give notice, and apprize, which means to appreciate or to value. Here is a volume that belongs on every language reference shelf. Cartoon illustrations.