Gild - guild

The homophones gild and guild can be confused, in speech because they sound identical (with a single vowel like that in 'ill', IPA: /gɪld/) and in writing because the spell-checker will not usually distinguish between the two - if, for example, you make a typing error.

• 'To gild is a verb. Its past tense is gilded; its past, or passive, participle is gilt. (Some obsolete meanings, and different word classes are recorded in OED.) It means literally 'to cover with a thin layer of gold'; many figurative meanings have also been applied, for example 'to cover with yellow paint [or, in the 16th and 17th centuries, blood]', or 'to pretend that some object is gold'.
  • 'To gild the lily' is to over-decorate something: the beauty of a natural flower needs no human skill to make it better.
  • 'To gild a pill' is to make something unpleasant easier to swallow: it may even be said of the process of bribery (applying 'gold' to make it easier for politicians, or judges, to make decisions contrary to their best instincts.
    • You may want to look at gilt - guilt for another confusion.
• A guild is a noun. Its basic meaning is 'an association' or 'brotherhood'. The guilds were originally - in the middle ages - trade associations; groups of merchants or tradesmen or craftsmen of a particular profession who grouped to protect their interests, by regulating their trade, looking to the welfare of aged members or their widows, or by negotiating as a group. They often had considerable power. Modern guilds, where they are not successors of ancient organisations, are usually associations of more or less worthy aims and purposes; the name is used as an alternative to 'club', 'association', 'confraternity' and so on.
  • Guildhalls are among the tourist sights of many long-established towns. They demonstrate the wealth and sociability of the guilds that built them.

• A further homophone that is unlikely to be needed by most readers of AWE, other than biologists and perhaps readers of Science Fiction, is gilled. This means 'having gills, like a fish: 'gills' are the underwater equivalent of lungs. Fishermen will also talk of a fish being gilled when they mean 'caught by the gills', or sometimes 'handled by hooking the fingers into the gill-cases'.