The graphemic distinctiveness of simple word stems in written English (henceforth stems) is usually discussed in terms of the discrimination of homophones: Two or more distinct stems that share a phonological form each have a unique graphemic form (e.g., meat / meet; pair / pear / pare) and in some cases we cannot ascribe the different spellings to etymology: scent ‘should’ be spelled sent given its history (borrowed from French sentir and Latin sentire). The lists in Carney (1994) and Venezky (1999) of heterographic words show that there is a considerable number of homophones that are discriminated in spelling. But there are also many homographic cases (e.g., bank, can), so any stipulated ‘principle of heterography’ is not universal. In this paper, we determine the scope and limitations of this principle empirically. Using the CELEX corpus as well as printed dictionaries, we first determine the number of homophonous simple stems in our data (like bank / bank or pair / pear / pare). Of these, we determine the fraction that has a distinct spelling (like pair / pear / pare). The overall ratio is well below 50%, which means that the principle is not as far-reaching as often assumed. Historically, it appears that in many cases we are not dealing with a graphemic differentiation of stems, but with a conservation of spellings. As a consequence, most distinctive spellings probably corresponded to distinctive sound forms at some point in their history. Sound change then led to homophony, but the graphemic form often remained distinct (as with e.g. loan / lone). Expressing lexical differences in the written form of stems does not seem to be overly important to English writers; there is no widespread lexical or morphological principle at work when it comes to the spelling of English stems.

书面英语中简单词干（以下称为词干）的字形独特性通常根据同音异义词的区分来讨论：两个或多个共享音韵形式的不同词干，每个词干都有独特的字形形式（例如，meat / meet；pair / pear / pare），在某些情况下，我们不能将不同的拼写归因于词源：鉴于其历史，气味“应该”被拼写为“sentire” （借自法语“sentire”和拉丁语“sentire ”）。 Carney (1994) 和 Venezky (1999) 的异形词列表表明，有相当多的同音词在拼写上受到歧视。但同形异义的情况也有很多（如bank、can），所以任何规定的“异质性原理”都不是普遍的。在本文中，我们根据经验确定了这一原则的范围和局限性。使用 CELEX 语料库以及印刷词典，我们首先确定数据中同音简单词干的数量（例如bank / bank或pair / pear / pare）。其中，我们确定具有不同拼写的分数（例如pair / pear / pare）。总体比例远低于 50%，这意味着该原则并不像通常假设的那样影响深远。从历史上看，在许多情况下，我们似乎并不是在处理词干的字形差异，而是在处理拼写的保存。因此，大多数独特的拼写可能对应于其历史上某个时刻的独特声音形式。声音的变化导致了同音，但字形形式通常保持不同（例如，loan / lone）。对于英语作家来说，以词干的书面形式表达词汇差异似乎并不太重要。当涉及到英语词干的拼写时，并没有广泛的词汇或词法原则在起作用。