What to do if your dove dove

“Walk” and “stroll” are synonyms. “Tall” and “short” are antonyms. So what are “dove” and “dove” if one is a bird and the other is the past tense of the verb “to dive”?

Did you say “homonyms”?

Good for you. I mean, that’s wrong, but at least you’re no worse off than I was until 15 minutes ago when I read an e-mail with the same question.

Dave Lessley of Glendale writes: “What do you call these words? They are spelled the same, but have different meanings. At first I thought they were homonyms, but those are words that sound alike, but have different meanings. These don’t fit that because they don’t sound alike; they are only spelled alike.”

Now a few of you may have scanned your memory banks and discovered, in a dusty corner of your mind, the word “homophone.” Good work. You’re doing better than either Dave or I, but still no cigar.

The correct word, which I found in my “Oxford English Grammar,” is “homograph.”

“Homographs are spelled the same but pronounced differently,” Oxford tells us, before handily listing some examples: the verb “lead” and the metal “lead”; “does,” the present singular of “do,” versus “does,” the plural of the female deer “doe”; “sow,” as in putting seeds in the ground, versus, “sow,” a female pig.

Homonyms, on the other hand, are “distinct words that happen to have the same form.” Examples of homonyms include the “bank” where you put money as opposed to the “bank” of a river and the swimming bird known as a “duck” versus the act of moving your head out of harm’s way really fast.

Words spelled differently but pronounced the same are “homophones.”

“Ate” and “eight” and “hare” and “hair” are all homophones.

Homophobes are people who stopped reading three paragraphs ago because the word roots in this column made them uncomfortable.

But how to remember all this? Well, homophone is probably the easiest to remember because the root “phone,” which we all know so well, refers specifically to sound.

Homophones sound alike.

Homonyms you can think of as “homo-names” ? one name shared by two different words. The river’s edge shares one name with the money depository ? bank.

The “graph” in homograph suggests visual images instead of sounds: a bar graph, graphic violence. So homographs are visually identical.

Those of you like to quit while you’re ahead might want to skip this next part. I know I do. Because, as I’ve just learned, there exist things called “homomorphs.” This one will definitely not be on the quiz because it seems to me a lot less useful than the others.

“Homomorphs” are words that are basically the same in meaning but are distinct grammatically. In other words, “ache” is a noun, and it’s a verb. So “ache” the noun and “ache” the verb are homomorphs. “Fast” is an adjective and it’s an adverb. “Trash” is not only a noun for garbage but a slang verb for, “to throw away or discard,” which is what I’m going to do with this bit of information.

Last but not least, there are “polysemes,” which are like homonyms just more closely related.

Unlike river banks and money banks, which are two distinctly different things, the hands of a person and the hands of a clock seem much more similar. In fact, intuition suggests that the clock parts were named after the body parts. And that’s why “hand,” in this case is a polyseme and not a homonym.

“Grasp” is another example of a word with polysemous variations: You can grasp something physically, which was probably the word’s first meaning, or you can grasp it mentally, which seems a natural extension of the former.

How can you know the difference?

In most dictionaries, a word’s polysemes all come under a single definition. Its homonyms get separate entries.

“Poly,” of course, originates from “many,” which reminds me that this may be one too many bits of information.