Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way but have different meanings. Sometimes they’re spelled identically and sometimes they aren’t. Types of homophones

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way but have different meanings. Sometimes they’re spelled identically and sometimes they aren’t. 
Types of homophones
Not all homophones are the same. When two words sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings, they are known as homonyms. For example, “knead” and “need” are homonyms as well as homophones. 
Homophones can be further classified as homographs and heterographs. 
Homographs are words that are spelled the same way, could be pronounced differently, and have different meanings. For example, “hail,” as in “I’ll hail a taxi,” and “hail,” as in “I got stuck in the hail,” are homographs, as are “bow” as in “I’ll tie the ribbon in a bow” and “bow” as in “Take a bow after you perform the song.”
Heterographs are words that are spelled differently and have different meanings, but are still pronounced the same way. “Flower” and “flour” are examples of heterographs. 
In contrast, heteronyms are words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently and have different meanings. An example is “tear,” as in “he had a tear in his eye,” and “tear,” as in “please tear up the paper”.
And then there are oronyms, a category of phrases that is sometimes grouped with homophones. Like homophones, oronyms sound the same, but they have different meanings—and they don’t always sound identical. “World peace” and “whirled peas” are examples of oronyms. 
There is also a category known as pseudo-homophones. These are pairs of words that sound identical, but one of the words is not an actual, recognized word. An example of a pair of pseudo-homophones is groan and grone (“grone” is an obsolete form of “groan”). Pseudo-homophones are more esoteric, as they’re typically used in lexical decision tasks to measure how quickly a study participant recognizes a word during psychology and psycholinguistic studies. 
Synophones are words that sound almost, but not quite, the same and have different meanings. Assure, ensure, and insure are synophones, for example.