Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings and sometimes different spellings. The document provides examples of common homophone pairs such as buy/bye/by, aloud/allowed, principle/principal, there/their, weather/whether, than/then, accept/except, knot/not, knew/new, meat/meet, peak/peek, for/four, forth/fourth, hole/whole, heard/herd, lie/lye, dye/die, made/maid, hear/here, blew/blue, eye/I, course/coarse, incite/insight, dear/deer, and bare/bear.