moped
The boy denied a moped moped all summer.
'Moped' is a heteronym created by pure collision: the noun MO-ped (/ˈmoʊˌpɛd/), a 1950s Swedish blend of motor and pedal, happens to be spelled exactly like moped (/moʊpt/), the past tense of the 400-year-old verb 'mope'. Unlike stress-shift pairs, these two forms don't even share a syllable count — two syllables for the bike, one for the sulk. In the sentence, the boy denied a moped (noun) moped (sulked) all summer, so the object of desire and the gloom it caused sit side by side in a single breath.
Meanings
A lightweight, low-powered motorbike, originally one that could also be pedaled; broadly, any small motorbike of modest speed.
- She weaved through the morning traffic on a bright red moped.
- Tourists rent mopeds by the hour to explore the island.
Past tense of 'mope': lingered in low spirits; sulked or drifted about listlessly and gloomily.
- He moped around the house for days after his team lost.
- The dog moped by the front door until she finally came home.
Word origin
The noun is a Swedish coinage of the early 1950s, clipped from 'motor' and 'pedaler' — the machine was literally a 'trampcykel med motor och pedaler', a pedal cycle with motor and pedals — and it entered English by 1954. The verb is simply the past tense of 'mope', recorded in English since the 16th century, of obscure origin and possibly related to Low German 'mopen' (to pout). The two became heteronyms by accident of inflection, not by shared ancestry.
Fun fact
'Moped' is one of the youngest heteronyms in English: Merriam-Webster dates the noun's first known use to 1954, meaning the past tense of a centuries-old verb woke up one day in the 1950s with a brand-new twin. It is also unusual in that the two pronunciations differ in syllable count — MO-ped has two, moped (rhymes with 'hoped') has one — something no stress-shift heteronym can manage.