Two days ago, I finally figured out what to call them. If words that are spelled differently — like there and their — and are pronounced the same way are referred to as homonyms, then why shouldn’t words that are spelled the same way and are pronounced differently — like read (REED) and read (RED) — be called heteronyms? I couldn’t believe that in all the years I have been thinking about words like these — and its been quite a few — that I never made this obvious connection.
In the nearly two decades of my life that I spent as a student in various classrooms of Northern California, I had never once heard of the concept of heteronyms. On the highly unlikely chance that I had discovered literary gold with my freshly coined descriptor, I typed my new word into google and discretely hoped for no matches.
Well, 85,000+ results later, I realized that I was not the first to discover the country called Heteronym. It even has its own homepage. That was created in 1996. Wow, I guess I was a little late for this one, huh?
Since I’m never deterred for very long, I clicked on the first link and checked out what was there. It was an exhaustive collection of heteronyms listed alphabetically with definitions and pronunciations. I was happy to see the half-dozen words on my mental list were included amongst the others.
So instead of just regurgitating the same old same old that has been on the web since Clinton won a second term, OJ’s civil trial, and Wistawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I decided to create several heteronymphonic sentences for your reading pleasure. As always, I invite you to contribute some of your own in the comments section.
Determined to never again hear that Stevie Nicks song again by ending his life in a most spectacular fashion, the white winged dove dove off the church steeple towards the concrete below.
“To what do you attribute your most prominent attribute?” the TMZ reporter asked the newly augmented Hollywood starlet as she exited the plastic surgeon’s office.
His shoes have never shined as brightly as they did since he moved to Warsaw thanks to the amazing and incredible Polish polish he bought off a street vendor.
The bass guitar playing big-mouthed bass was the envy of all the fish in the river for his ability to lay down the fattest of fat grooves.
The wheelchair bound invalid rolled himself into the registrar of voters after the election and told the bureaucrat behind the desk, “My vote will not be made invalid because of alleged voter fraud in my precinct!”
Even though he was normally a rebel, Billy Idol steadfastly refused to rebel against his inner punk rocker and play his greatest hits backed by a quintet of accordionists and some dude playing the cowbell.
For the sake of her friends who had already had a couple of shots while waiting for their sushi to arrive, Maheen hesitantly drank her sake.
Rather than resign and update his resume, he chose to resign the contract and resume his employment with the team.
When he was younger he got into a heated conflict with a friend over a contest to convert a house that was occupied by an escaped convict and his chihuahua into a Church of Excess Verbiage, he could not contest the fact that he was forced to conflict with his friend because he was indeed a new convert to the Church so much so that when the case went to trial years later, it was easy for a jury of his peers to convict him.*
*Sorry about that one. Four in one is quite challenging.
The Adventures of ALS Boy 
If you like thinking about words, there’s a cool book by Dr. Seuss called: The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough.
Funny — this came up in pub quiz a few weeks ago. The quizmaster asked for the term for two words spelled the same but with different meanings and pronounced differently. I came up with “homographs” — and although we got it wrong (he was looking for “heteronyms”), later research indicated that I was technically correct because heteronyms are a form of homograph. But I digress.
Being part hippie, I dig the title reference (although some might misread the word “Heteronymphonic” to be somehow sexual in nature…)
And being a word nerd, I love this stuff. Although I thoroughly enjoyed reading your digest of heteronyms, I’m sure some of your readers find it hard to digest.