oronym

Definition:

A sequence of words (for example, "ice cream") that sounds the same as a different sequence of words ("I scream"). See also:

• Mondegreen
• Homophones
• The Spell Checker Poem

Etymology:

Coined by Gyles Brandreth in The Joy of Lex, 1980

Examples and Observations:

• "All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. . . . The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in oronyms, strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways:

  The good can decay many ways.
  The good candy came anyways.
  
  The stuffy nose can lead to problems.
  The stuff he knows can lead to problems."

  (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, William Morrow & Co., 1994)



• "Last year, a waitress won a contest to sell the most beer at a Hooters bar in Florida. But it wasn’t long before trouble began brewing over the prize she had been promised.
  
  "After being led to the parking lot for what she thought was a new Toyota, the woman wound up with a Star Wars doll--a toy Yoda. She sued. . . .
  
  "Sounds odd? Well sounds can be odd, and linguists have plenty of labels for them. In the case of Toyota and toy Yoda, our brains are faced with 'oronyms'--virtually identical speech that can be interpreted in different ways. English is full of these devilish duos. For example, I scream versus ice cream, a notion versus an ocean, and some others versus some mothers."
  (Blair Shewchuk, "Mnopspteiche? Relax for a Spell," CBCNews.ca, September 27, 2002)