To home in on or hone in on? 20 words you shouldn’t confuse (3-4)
Which of these two sentences is correct?
A teaching style which homes in on what is important for each pupil.
Or
A teaching style which hones in on what is important for each pupil.
Where you live in the English-speaking world will affect your opinion.
Which also means that whichever version you use, someone somewhere will think it wrong.
Many people use hone in.
A US copywriter spotted “home in” in a blog of mine, and kindly pointed out what she thought was a typo. She was surprised when I told her it was intentional. In a straw poll in her office – this was in the US, remember – everyone agreed hone was correct.
Wearing my language purist hat, I would classify hone in as a malapropism or an eggcorn. 
But wearing my descriptivist hat, I would have to say it is an example of language change in action.
Home in is a metaphor, from home used as a verb to describe how a missile or aircraft is directed to a target, as in:
The other helicopter located the dinghy by homing in on the bleeping of the emergency distress call.
To hone means “to sharpen a knife with a whetstone”, or “to improve a skill or talent”.
What data is there?
I looked in the Oxford English Corpus, which consists of about 2.6 billion words of data from US, British and several other varieties of English.
First, home in is about 70% more frequent than hone in. But there is a noticeable contrast between British and US English. In US English, home in occurs 532 times, while hone in occurs 421 times. So, hone in constitutes getting on for half the total pie.
But in Britain the picture is rather different. Of the total pie, 85% are examples with home in.
What do dictionaries and usage guides say?
Oxford Dictionaries Online in both World English and US versions notes at home in on that hone is quite common in mainstream US writing, but that many people still consider it a mistake, as do Collins and freedictionary.com. Macmillan lists it with no comment.
The OED doesn’t classify it as a mistake. Instead it notes that it is “originally US”, and gives the earliest example from 1965. The revised (4th) edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage covers similar territory to this blog.
On the other side of the pond, Merriam-Webster notes the existence of hone in and suggests that it “seems to have become established in American usage”. The American Heritage College Dictionary (2004) gives “to direct one’s attention; focus” as a meaning of hone in. Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage considers it unequivocally wrong.
So…?
The hone in variant has been around for nearly half a century. It is used in many parts of the Anglosphere. Some dictionaries list it without comment, while others warn against it.
If you use it, you will not be misunderstood. However, if you do use it, bear in mind that some people will consider it a mistake, and therefore conclude that you can’t use English “correctly”. And others will come to the same conclusion if you use home in.
To steer clear of the problem, why not use focus on, concentrate on, zero in on, or any other synonym that suits your context?
Filed under: Advice for writers, eggcorns, Grammar, Meaning of words, Writing Skills Tagged: 20 confusable words, American Writing
