A homophone is a word that sounds the same as another word, but has a different spelling and a different meaning.
For the word past, the homophone would be passed.
Note that, like all other homophones, the meaning of past and passed are different. (If you are confused by words that have the same sound, are spelled differently, but have the same meaning, that is understandable.
For color and colour, for example, they are not considered homophones. The reason is that they are the same word. The difference in spelling comes from the American English (color) and British English (colour) spelling habits.
However, they are the same word regardless of the slightly different spelling. This is often seen with o and ou, or z and s, which are American English and British English, respectively.)
Past means something that happened before now. For example, last year would be the past. Whenever you add “-ed” to the end of a verb, that is changing it to the past tense.
- In the past, people used to walk everywhere rather than getting in a car, bus, or train as we do now.
- This past semester was one of my hardest in school, but I was proud to earn As in all of my classes!
Passed is the past tense of the verb “to pass”. When something has passed, you know that it has gone by before now.
- I am sorry, but the bus just passed by here. You will have to wait for the next one.
- When I realized that the opportunity had already passed, I vowed to take advantage of the next one!
