homophonic

Homophonic is an adjective relating to homophony. In music, a homophonic texture is one in which a clear melody is supported by a subordinate harmony or accompaniment. The melody is dominant; the accompanying chords or voices move in the same rhythm, creating a vertical harmonic structure. This contrasts with monophony (a single melodic line) and polyphony (multiple independent melodies). In Western art music, common examples include a singer with piano accompaniment or a choral setting in which all voices move together in chords while the melody is carried by one line.

In linguistics, homophonic describes the property of relating to homophones—words that are pronounced alike but differ in meaning or spelling. The term is used to discuss pronunciation patterns, spelling correspondences, and phonological phenomena. The more common noun is homophone, but homophonic is used in technical contexts or to describe sound-alike phenomena in discourse and analysis.

In cryptography, a homophonic substitution refers to a cipher in which a single plaintext symbol may be encrypted as several possible ciphertext symbols to obscure frequency analysis. The technique distributes the frequencies of letters more evenly and enlarges the ciphertext, complicating statistical attacks. Homophonic ciphers are studied in the history of cryptography and illustrate how altering symbol mappings can affect the security of a code.