nearhomographs

Nearhomographs are pairs or groups of words that are visually almost identical in spelling but differ in a small orthographic detail and carry distinct meanings. The term is informal and not a widely standardized category in linguistics; it is used in editorial, educational, and computational discussions to describe close but non-identical spellings that can cause confusion in reading or processing text. They lie between true homographs (same spelling, different meanings) and near-homophones (sound alike but may be spelled differently), focusing on near-identical appearance rather than pronunciation.

Because of their similarity, near-homographs can pose challenges for readers, writers, and automated systems. They are important in literacy education, proofreading, typography, and optical character recognition, where a single mistyped or misread character can change the intended meaning. In natural language processing, identifying near-homographic pairs can aid in spell-checking, typo correction, and word-sense disambiguation, especially in noisier text or multilingual contexts.

Common methods to identify near-homographs include measuring orthographic distance (for example, Levenshtein distance of one or two), analyzing diacritic differences, and considering hyphenation or spacing variants. Examples of near-homographs include accept vs except, dessert vs desert, complement vs compliment, resume vs résumé, and café vs cafe. These pairs illustrate how a small orthographic difference can yield distinct lexical entries that may require careful attention in reading, writing, and automated text processing.