Heteronym (linguistics)

Such a definition would include virtually every pair of words in the language, so "heterophone" in this sense is normally restricted to instances where there is some particular reason to highlight the different sound.

Triple heteronyms are extremely rare in English; three examples, sin, mobile and does, are listed below.

For example, 20% of the 2400 most common Chinese characters have multiple readings;[1][2][3] e.g., 行 can represent háng 'profession' or xíng 'OK'.

[7] Italian spelling is largely unambiguous, althouɡh there are some exceptions: When stress is on the final, the vowel is written with an accent: mori 'mulberries' and morì 'he/she died'.

Some common cases:[8] Dutch has heteronyms which vary in stress position, known as klemtoonhomogramen 'stress homograms', such as appel: [ˈɑpəl] 'apple' vs. [ɑˈpɛl] 'appeal' (formerly written appèl).

Other examples include beamen, bedelen, hockeyster, kantelen, misdadiger, overweg, verspringen, verwerpen.