Reed's Homophones

Reed’s Homophones offers a serious but light-hearted overview of several thousand homophone pairs that confuse readers and writers of English. Along with an explanation of the Latin and Greek root words that are found as prefixes in hundreds of English words, the book delves into mondegreens, neologisms, odd synonyms and antonyms, and a few of the author’s pet peeves, and includes a handy list of easily confused words.

This book was created to be used and enjoyed by anyone who loves the English language. Though originally compiled to help professional writers and editors, it should prove equally useful to business owners, marketing specialists, undergraduates, students and teachers of ESL, bloggers . . . in short, anyone who loves the language and wants to write well enough that the words they use don’t come back to haunt or embarrass them.

Author Biography

A. D. Reed is a writer and editor who operates the editorial service My Own Editor (www.myowneditor.com) and founded the North Carolina-based publishing imprint Pisgah Press LLC (www.pisgahpress.com). A lover of languages since childhood, he grew up with a multilingual, Canadian-born Russian émigrée mother who spoke English with a flat Cleveland, Ohio, accent and Russian like a lifelong Muscovite; a father from a south Georgia farm family who spoke carefully and precisely (like many a self-conscious, self-made man) though with a noticeable drawl; an elder sister who became an acclaimed editor in Canada and the Cayman Islands, and an older brother who, after careers as a librarian and teacher (and writing poetry), nits and picks with the best of them. Their extended family and friends spoke southern, Appalachian, British, Anglo-German, Greek-American, deep country, and transplanted-New-Yorker dialects, among many others-all of which Reed listened to and absorbed with fascination. He studied French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Russian as a high school and college student, becoming fluent in some languages, competent in others; but his first love remains the elegant, flexible, surprising, often incomprehensible, sometimes ridiculous, always delightful mélange of tongues that has gradually evolved into the modern American English language.