Minimal pair

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In linguistics, two words differing by only one unit of sound, or phoneme, are called a minimal pair. Minimal pairs are widely used in language teaching. In English, typical examples are:

  • 'cat' and 'mat'
  • 'fish' and 'wish'
  • 'abortion' and 'apportion'
  • 'parole' and 'patrol'

Spelling can disguise the fact of a minimal pair; some examples of this are:

  • 'bane' and 'boon'
  • 'league' and 'leak'
  • 'do' and 'two'
  • 'Evans' and 'heavens'
  • 'boater' and 'voter'
  • 'mosque' and 'musk'
  • 'knows' and 'nose'
  • 'loose' and 'lose', where the 'o' sound is the same 'oo', but the 's' is unvoiced in 'loose' and voiced in 'lose'
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