Are You Content?

  If you discover any additional heteronyms in the non-obscure category, you should be congratulated.  Throw yourself a party and have a violinist serenade you in a rose-covered arbor: a bower in a bower.

While conducting your search, however, we urge you to adhere to our house rules.  The true and pure Heteronym must do more than just pass the single spelling, different pronunciation and different meaning test.  Use of foreign words is unsporting unless they have crept so thoroughly into the English language that they have acquired citizenship, or at least green cards.  Uninspired "re" words (where "re" means "again") as in "Please release me from my promise to release this apartment," are not worthy of consideration, nor are hyphenated instances or contractions.  Finally, a proper heteronymphile steers clear of mere tense changes like "I want to read the book you read yesterday," or noun-and-verb shifts like "Farmers produce produce," because there is only one underlying meaning.  But we must concede that this last rule is sometimes difficult to apply, and we accommodate particularly delicious and charming examples that might otherwise raise eyebrows.

But don't get so heteronympholeptic that you make your friends want to shoot you.  Remember that man's laughter is much preferable to manslaughter.