Fun with Homonyms.

[feng_shui_house]

Bolt means entirely different things to a horse trainer, a weather watcher, a sewist, a gardener, a machinist, a security guard, a sharpshooter, an archer, or a cook.

Grain means entirely different things to a farmer, a cook, a sewist, a photographer, a pharmacist, and a lumberyard worker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_true_homonyms

Heteronyms, Homonyms, Homographs and Homophones

Comments

[vera_j]

WOW!!! This is great - I have saved the links, thank you!

[feng_shui_house]

English is such a zany language. :^) Enjoy!

[pebblerocker]

I wouldn't have got more than three or four meanings for each off the top of my head!

[feng_shui_house]

I started thinking about 'bolt' after learning that when my radish plant flowered instead of growing radishes, that meant it had 'bolted' and then the bolts kept striking. :^)

[haldane]

It's also amusing to check the dictionary entries for "part".

Dictionary.com has something like 13 noun forms and 13 verb forms. And I suspect they're missing a few highly technical uses, like your radishes.

[feng_shui_house]

I feel sorry for people who have to learn English as a second language. The Logic, it is not there, you just have to absorb English unthinkingly, while you are an innocent babe who has no logic.

[haldane]

Thats why there's such a market in Japan now for games and anime translators. If you don't want to become a standing joke, you *have* to have English-language natives doing a second pass on your translations. My James is at university doing Arts-Japanese and hopes to go into exactly that kind of work, possibly even moving to Japan.

[haldane]

Oh, and Neil has added another use of "grain", for marksmen who calculate loads using "grains" of powder.

[feng_shui_house]

Ah! I imagine that's a related meaning to the pharmacist, but probably for different units of measure.

[feng_shui_house]

That sounds like an excellent career, I hope it turns out well for James.