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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

English's spelling irregularities help with disambiguating homophones:

  cent / sent / scent
  ceiling / sealing
  cite / sight / site
  colonel / kernel
  carrot / karat
  cue / queue

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Which, of course, does not help things like polish polish (made in Warsaw) and to produce produce (pull apples out of a bag). However you look at it, when they set up English words and spelling there was large quantities of alcohol involved.

Also read (future tense) and read (past tense) being pronounced differently despite the same spelling.

And present present (to pull a gift out of, well, a bag)

Only in writing. The disambiguation is already needed when spoken and the context does this.

If you look up these words in the dictionary, the same word with the same spelling very often has several different definitions that are often unrelated because homographs (same spelling, but different meaning) are super-common in English. Dictionaries don't account for newer or more niche meanings of words either.

How is it that you can say these words without confusion?

Language is context sensitive and you understand the word based on the context around it. Likewise, you understand homographs based on the context. Because of this, spelling isn't as important as it might appear.

On paper, yes. But not when someone speaks. If you used a homophone while speaking, the listener would be able to distinguish which variant the talker intended based on context. I would argue this is enough of a reason for written text as well.

Some other languages do the same with diacritics.

Most don't bother because context is nearly always sufficient.

And cause confusion with needless heterographs?

practice / practise licence / license

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