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Words that share the exact identical written spelling but have different etymologies, meanings, and often different pronunciations (e.g. 'lead' to guide vs. 'lead' the heavy metal).
Homographs arise when two etymologically distinct words evolve into identical spellings through historical phonetic convergence or loanword borrowing. When homographs also differ in pronunciation, they are specifically termed 'heteronyms' (such as 'wind' /wɪnd/ the gust of air vs. 'wind' /waɪnd/ to turn a key). When they share both spelling and pronunciation, they are 'homonyms' (such as 'bat' the winged flying mammal from Scandinavian vs. 'bat' the wooden club from Old French). Understanding homographs is fundamental to natural language processing and lexical disambiguation, as sentence syntax and context are necessary to resolve the author's intended sense.
Test any English word to explore homographic meanings and dual senses:
Verified English words exemplifying homographs with Scrabble scores
Linguistic definitions, etymological origins, and tournament usage
All heteronyms are homographs, but not all homographs are heteronyms. Heteronyms are homographs that are pronounced differently (e.g., tear /tɪər/ vs. tear /tɛər/). If pronunciation is identical, they are homonyms (e.g., bank).