An illustrative guide to common words people tend to misuse

We’ve all been there. There are just certain words that sound so much alike even though they have completely different meanings. And sometimes, when we are required to spell them, it is a STRUGGLE. That is why we are so grateful for illustrator Bruce Worden’s brilliantly clever depictions of some of your favorite homophones.

He actually made one of these illustrations on a weekly basis from 2011 through 2016. He told MyModernMet that he “was inspired to do it because I felt like, as spell-check software became more and more reliable, I was seeing a surprising amount of homophone typos slipping through professionally edited content — presumably because the software still recognized them as real words and there weren’t enough human eyes on the job. I just wanted to do something to be ‘part of the solution’ instead of shaking my fist at the air.”

In addition to the solution, Worden has also provided us with a bit of wit … or whit … whatever. Check out some of his best below (with his descriptions) and try not to laugh out loud — and for more of Worden’s wordplay, visit his Homophones, Weakly blog.