HOMONYM/HOMOGRAPH

Homonymy is a kind of semantic relation. Two words are homonyms if they are pronounced or spelled the same way but have different meanings.

One of the most commonly cited examples of a homonymous word is bank, which has a financial institution sense and a edge of a river sense. These senses seem clearly unrelated, and the fact that they are associated with the same word form seems purely accidental. (However, according to Verspoor (1997) has historical linguistics research on Italian revealed that at some point in the development of the Italian language, these two senses of bank actually coincided by virtue of the fact that bankers (lenders of money) sat on the riverbanks while doing their business. So going to the financial institution meant going to the edge of the river, hence to the bank.)

Hobbs (1986, p. 1): "a homophone is one of two or more words pronounced the same ("sounds alike") but different in spelling and meaning, such as cite, sight, and site. On the other hand, a homograph is one of two or more words spelled the same ("look-alikes") but different in sound and meaning, such as tear (separate or pull apart) and tear (secretion from the eye)"