128. Flower and Flour

Flower and flour are two more nouns that sound exactly alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings.

A flower is a blooming plant that grows in the garden or gets cut and put into a vase.
The rose is a flower that smells very sweet.
I planted a seed and it grew into a flower.

Flour is made from crushed-up grain. It looks white and powdery. We use flour when baking cakes, cookies, and muffins.
This cookie recipe calls for two cups of flour.
Mom bought a bag of flour at the store today.

Here is a trick for keeping these two words straight in your head. The word flour has a -u in it. That -u looks like a measuring cup. When baking, we scoop flour into a measuring cup before putting it into the bowl and mixing the dough. You can remember that flour is the baking word because the –u looks like a measuring cup. Flower is the word for the growing plant. Flower and growing both have a -w.

  • Now you try it. Write a sentence with with baking word flour . Then write a word with the growing plant word flower . That wasn’t too hard, was it?