The first essential, then, is to know the extent and nature of the mischief; and this can only be accomplished by setting out the homophones in a table before the eye.  The list below is taken from a ‘pronouncing dictionary’ which professes not to deal with obsolete words, and it gives over 800 ambiguous sounds; so that, since these must be at least doublets, and many of them are triplets or quadruplets, we must have something between 1,600 and 2,000 words of ambiguous meaning in our ordinary vocabulary.[4]

[Footnote 4:  In Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary there is a list of homonyms, that is words which are ambiguous to the eye by similar spellings, as homophones are to the ear by similar sounds:  and that list, which includes obsolete words, has 1,600 items. 1,600 is the number of homophones which our list would show if they were all only doublets.]

Now it is variously estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 words is about the limit of an average educated man’s talking vocabulary, and since the 1,600 are, the most of them, words which such a speaker will use (the reader can judge for himself) it follows that he has a foolishly imperfect and clumsy instrument.

As to what proportion 1,700 (say) may be to the full vocabulary of the language—­it is difficult to estimate this because the dictionaries vary so much.  The word homophone is not recognized by Johnson or by Richardson:  Johnson under homo- has six derivatives of Herbert Spencer’s favourite word homogeneous, but beside these only four other words with this Greek affix.  Richardson’s dictionary has an even smaller number of such entries.  Jones has 11 entries of homo-, and these of only five words, but the Oxford dictionary, besides 50 words noted and quoted beginning with homo-, has 64 others with special articles.

Dr. Richard Morris estimated the number of words in an English dictionary as 100,000:  Jones has 38,000 words, exclusive of proper names, and I am told that the Oxford dictionary will have over 300,000.  Its 114 homo- words will show how this huge number is partly supplied.

Before the reader plunges into the list, I should wish to fortify his spirit against premature despair by telling him that in my tedious searching of the dictionary for these words I was myself cheered to find how many words there were which are not homophones.

LIST OF HOMOPHONES

This list, the object of which is to make the reader easily acquainted with the actual defect of the language in this particular, does not pretend to be complete or scientific; and in the identification of doubtful words the clue was dictated by brevity. s., v., and adj. mean substantive, verb, and adjective.  The sections were made to aid the conspectus.

The main indictment is contained in sections i, ii, and iii.  These three sections contain 505 entries, involving some 1,075 words.