That's a list to rival mine! Have you actually seen all of these "in the wild", so to speak?
Trooper1270: Draught / Draft
Apparently, Britain is about the only country that maintains a completely different set of uses for the two spellings of the word (and it
is two different spellings of the exact same word, unlike many of the other homophones mentioned in this thread, where words that are both etymologically and definitionally dissimilar came to be spelled and/or pronounced similarly or identically). The rest of the English-speaking world uses one or the other for most or all senses (but still recognizes the other spelling, though flagging it as either foreign or--in the case of
draught--archaic), or--as is apparently the case in Canada--uses the two interchangeably.
In other words, complaining about this one is like a given person complaining that foreign English-speakers spell
armor/armour or
recognize/recognise differently from how their own countrymen do. I tried to mostly avoid such cases in my own list of "complaints"...though I couldn't resist sneaking in a jab or two at some more recent sea changes in British English....
Do you mean that you've seen people use the "y" spelling to mean the
"fatigued or sleepy" sense? Otherwise, if
"rubber wheel covering" is what's meant, this is just another case where the spelling differs by country.
Trooper1270: Fawn / Thorn
My first thought when seeing this was, "What the hell...?", since these words aren't even pronounced similarly in American English. But then I imagined each word being pronounced in a certain dialect (a non-rhotic one where there's been an F-Th merger, and using the British pronunciation(s?) of the respective vowels), and I could
somewhat understand. Still facepalm-worthy, though. =D
