list of words that sound alike but are spelled differently
These sets of words are called homophones (or sometimes homonyms), and they can cause a lot of trouble for spellers. What Are Homophones? Homophones are two or more words that sound alike but that are spelled differently and have different meanings. Here are a few homophone pairs: deer and dear, billed and build, and sew, so, and sow. Homophones occur in English because there are multiple ways to spell the same sound. For example: The sound of /n/ can be spelled with the letter N or the letter combination KN, resulting in the homophones night and knight. The sound of /Ä/ can be spelled A-consonant-E or AY (among other possible spellings), giving us daze and days.
Those are homophones -- words with the same sound but different spellings (flower vs. flour, write vs. right). Homophones most usually have different meanings (as in the example). Depending on how we look at things, we could also say homonyms are a subset of homophones.