Are "whores" and "horse" homophones?

I’m Spanish but sometimes see TV shows in English.

My question is whether the words horse and whores sound exactly the same, because in many English language TV shows it seems like they are, which really surprises me.

Are they homophones?

I cannot hear any voicing at the end of the word whores to distinguish the two words.

Solution 1:

In most varieties of English, these two words are not homophones. But there is an interesting story about why this is so.

In English the alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/ are contrastive. Notionally, the first is unvoiced and the second voiced. So we can find minimal pairs of words where the difference in voicing results in a change of meaning:

• /su:/
• /zu:/

The first word here is the word sue or Sue, the second is the word zoo.

In a language like Spanish, there is only one alveolar fricative, /s/. This is usually voiceless (although it can become voiced in certain environments). However because there is no phoneme /z/ in Spanish, if a speaker uses a [z] instead of an [s] in a word, it will still be recognised as the same word. So, for example, English speakers of Spanish may well use a [z] in all sorts of words where a Spanish speaker would use an [s], but it will always be recognised as the Spanish phoneme /s/. In other words a Spanish speaker will always map both an [s] and a [z] sound onto the Spanish phoneme /s/.

Because of this lack of contrast in Spanish, it is often difficult for Spanish speakers to differentiate between /s/ and /z/ when listening to English.

Now, many English speakers will tell you that the sound at the end of the word whores is voiced. In actual fact, if it is not followed by a word beginning with a voiced sound, then the /z/ at the end of the word whores will be at least partially, and quite probably completely devoiced. We would show this in a narrow transcription by putting a little circle as a diacritic under the z:

• [hɔ:z̥]

  ^{British English transcription}

A native English speaker will swear blind—I predict at least ten comments under this post saying exactly this—that they can hear the voicing in the sound at the end of the word whores when spoken naturally. However, if you cut that devoiced /z/ off the end of the word and play it back to them without the rest of the word they will confidently tell you that it's an /s/.

Here is what is really happening when a native speaker hears the word whores and why they can differentiate it from the word horse. Unvoiced consonants have an effect on preceding vowels, whereby they cause them to become much shorter. This effect is known as prefortis clipping. If you say the word bead and then the word beat you should be able to hear that the vowel in the word beat is much shorter than the vowel in the word bead. [Try it at home!] It is the unclipped, and therefore relatively long vowel in the word bead that tells your language brain that the phoneme at the end is a 'voiced' /d/ and not an unvoiced /t/. Your brain will trick you into thinking that the sound at the end of the word bead is voiced, but this is just because of the length of the vowel.

So, if a Spanish speaker listening to the word whores and horse puts all their concentration into listening to whether they can hear any voicing in the fricative at the ends of these words, they will not be able to detect any. However, if they concentrate on the contrasting lengths of the vowels, they will notice that the vowel in horse is much shorter than the vowel in whores. This is actually what leads English speakers to hear the difference between the two words.

The story above is true for both standard British and American English (both words will have an /r/ of course in most varieties of American English). However, there may well be varieties of English which use different vowels in each of these two items.

Solution 2:

Although the phonetic transcription in a dictionary may be the same, I do hear a difference in most native accents.

• Start: I'd say the H in Horse is a bit stronger than the WH
• Middle: I'd say the O in horse is more of an oe and shorter than in whore.

You would probably hear more difference in some accents than others, though. My2¢

EDIT. This comment by @tchrist explained it far better, in a more technical way:

The voiced /z/ of the WH- word triggers a longer /o/vowel via regressive assimilation, which triggers more pronounced rounding of that /o/, which in turn triggers greater rounding of the initial consonant than occurs in the H- word, again via regressive assimilation