All rules

Homophone typed for another (its / it's, their / there)

homophone-slipon by defaultEnglish

A sound-alike typed for another word, such as "it's own" or "their are"

Example

Flagged
The team kept it's own schedule. Their are two reviews left.
What chaff prints
1:1 "it's own" has one homophone typed for another 1:34 "their are" has one homophone typed for another
Fixed
The team kept its own schedule. There are two reviews left.
What chaff prints
no finding

How to fix

Use the word you meant ("it's own" → "its own", "their are" → "there are", "could of" → "could have").

Why it matters

"Its" and "it's", "their", "there" and "they're" sound alike, and a spell checker passes either. chaff looks only at pairs where the next word settles which was meant: "it's own" can only be "its own", "their are" can only be "there are". Pairs the next word does not settle ("its time", "they're people") are not checked. The pairs are listed in the lexicon.

What it does not flag

Only the pairs on chaff's list are checked, and only in English documents. Pairs the next word does not settle ("its time", "they're people") are not. Not used in fiction or speeches, which spell dialect on purpose.

Turning it off or relaxing it

Silence this one spot (in the document)
<!-- stet: homophone-slip — reason -->
Relax it for the team (the reason is kept as a comment in chaff.yaml)
npx chaffjs relax homophone-slip --why "reason"
Turn it off for the team (chaff.yaml)
rules: homophone-slip: off
Technical details
Layer
L2
Status
stable
Severity
warning
Languages
en
Suited to
business, technical, blog, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
Reads from the document
pos

Levels

Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).

strictreported once there are 1
normalreported once there are 1
relaxedreported once there are 2

By genre

Runs by default in
technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/email, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes, legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper
Turned off by the genre in
literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript

Genres

Message

"{matched}" has one homophone typed for another

Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay

This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/homophone-slip.yaml