first-born might say, 'Now that you have a son and heir, see that he
gets enough sun and air'.]

Homophony is between words as _significant_ sounds, but it is needful
to state that homophonous words must be _different_ words, else we
should include a whole class of words which are not true homophones.
Such words as _draft_, _train_, _board_, have each of them separate
meanings as various and distinct as some true homophones; for
instance, a draught of air, the miraculous draught of fishes, the
draught of a ship, the draft of a picture, or a draught of medicine,
or the present draft of this essay, though it may ultimately appear
medicinal, are, some of them, quite as distinct objects or notions
as, for instance, _vane_ and _vein_ are: but the ambiguity of _draft_,
however spelt, is due to its being the name of anything that is
_drawn_; and since there are many ways of drawing things, and
different things are drawn in different ways, the _same word_ has come
to carry very discrepant significations.

Though such words as these[2] are often inconveniently and even
distressingly ambiguous, they are not homophones, and are therefore
excluded from my list: they exhibit different meanings of one word,
not the same sound of different words: they are of necessity present,
I suppose, in all languages, and corresponding words in independent
languages will often develop exactly corresponding varieties of
meaning. But since the ultimate origin and derivation of a word is
sometimes uncertain, the scientific distinction cannot be strictly
enforced.

[Footnote 2: Such words have no technical class-name; they are merely
extreme examples of the ambiguity common to most words, which grows