Do You Want a Whole Donut or a Donut Hole?

I remember these homophonic words <whole> and <hole> because of donuts. Would you rather have a whole donut or a donut hole? A whole donut would be the entire thing for a bigger appetite. A donut hole is the tiny bit conceptualized as if scooped out of the middle of a round donut, for tiny appetites.

<Hole> is what is hollowed out. It is most often used as a noun, which can be helpful: a donut hole, a pin hole, a sink hole, a pot hole. Although <hole> can be used as a verb, it’s a bit awkward usage. “The front door was holed after the shootout.” We’d typically say, “The front door had a bunch of holes after the shootout,” (noun usage).

<Whole>, though, can also be used as a noun as well. “We want to do this project as a whole,” or, “Two halves of the pizza make a whole.” Both of those uses of <whole> in these sentences are nouns. In the sentence, “Two halves of the pizza make a whole pizza,” – here <whole> is a quantifier. It is giving information about how much of the pizza is available.

In the title, “whole donut”- <whole> is telling how much of the donut, whereas in “donut hole,” the <donut> is modifying the <hole>, the bits. It’s not a bullet hole or a rabbit hole, but a donut hole. I digress on grammar, but grammar can assist in deciphering homophones in some cases.

Another interesting find was the phrase “hole up.” The robber is hole up in the woods”. He was hiding out. Because I often hear this phrase in the past tense, “The robber WAS holed up in the woods,” I always thought the term was “hold up” and not “hole up.” I justified the meaning in my head that he was being held there until he could make his escape, when really he found some hollow place that evaded detection to hide away.

Lastly, I want to leave you with an image from an amazing artist, Bruce Worden, who creates visual representations of homophones at his blog: homophones weakly. It looks like he’ll be having a whole new book coming out about the sketches he’s created that help with the conceptual differences of some homophones.