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I was going to write some musings on pronunciation stimulated by some recent reading but I was blown off course by last Saturday's Jumbo (1437) 26ac. I am sure that I am not the only crossword solver whose hair and toes curl when asked to consider flaw as being a homophone of floor. As well as Scotland, a large chunk of northern England must surely agree with me. And that is quite apart from expecting to accept that floor and ground mean the same thing. My personal distinction is that the ground is outside and unprepared in any way whereas floor suggests an artificial surface of some kind, often but not necessarily always indoors.
Rant over!

I pronounce flaw and floor the same, parallelogram. How do you differentiate the two?

But I have come across clues that require ate to be pronounced the same as eight. I tend to say et when I have eaten.

Hello orson. I have nothing against people speaking in this way. It is not incomprehensible like some accents I have heard but it is not, on my opinion, a sound foundation for a crossword clue.
I see a similar point has been raised in another thread about the variation of homophones with locality. Like most Scots, too, I don't add a phantom r to the end of words like these.
I pronounce flaw as in "Aw, what a pity". Similarly caw (to resemble the sound of a crow), jaw, law, maw, paw, raw, saw.
Going through readers comments in other papers online, I quite often come across draw used instead of drawer and I wonder if the writer thinks that the word is actually draw but pronounced drawr.

I know I've commented on similar threads in the past, and I speak as someone who is no fan of the homophone (and who is a positive enemy of the partial homophone, where an element of the solution which isn't a real word is indicated).

I am prepared to accept a complete homophone if the pronunciations as given by Chambers are identical. So for me 'soar' and 'sore' are ok. I'm sure there are people who would pronounce the words differently, but that isn't the point - there are plenty of people who wouldn't use the word 'preposterous' to mean 'having that which should be first at the end', but Chambers says that they could if they wanted to.

'Sore' and 'saw' (or flaw/floor, draw/drawer etc) are a different matter. Chambers says that they are pronounced differently, so they are simply not homophones.

Some compilers seem to think that if someone somewhere pronounces words the same, they are OK as homophones - and there are some extreme examples! I was on a nature trip in Costa Rica a few years ago with a woman who pronounced "wires" as "wahs" and "flowers" as "flahs"!