Learn English – If I wanted to say, “There are three twos in the English language,” would “twos” be the correct spelling

grammaticality

Taken from this question on a blog, how would correct usage in the situation where you are talking about "to, too and two" in the english language be phrased?

Would it be along the lines of "There are three variations of two/too/to", or would it be correct regardless of which variation was used?

Best Answer

OED does use the spelling twos:

A.2.d. two and two, two by two, formerly also by two and two: in groups or sets of two; two at a time; by twos.

BUT you're not talking about the word two. You're talking about homophones of the word twoto, too and two. You can't say "There are three twos", because there aren't. [Well, two is listed as noun, adjective and adverb, so I suppose there are, but that's not relevant here.]

The best you can say is that there are three words which sound like two, or that there are two homophones of two (pick whichever variant you need for that one).

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