Home In On Or Hone In On

In the early 1900s home picked up the more specific sense of to proceed especially under control of an automatic aiming mechanism toward a specified target as a plane missile or location.

Home in means to get closer to like a missile homing in on its target while hone in means to pay close attention to or listen to something. Home in is the older standard variant. You can remember to use home in by thinking of a homing pigeon on the roof of a castle. In the same sense one can home in on the answer for example.

Hone in is also acceptable but far less common and comes from the meaning of hone referring to sharpening or making more acute. So the simple answer is that a person bird or aircraft homes in on a target but a person hones his or her skills. According to garner s modern american english the original metaphor was derived from homing pigeons and over the course of the 20th century it also became linked to aircraft and missiles. Home can be verb referring to finding one s way to a destination such as homing pigeons and homing missiles do.

So getting back to the quick and dirty tip to find something or get closer to something you home in on it or zero in on it. To home in on something is to narrow one s focus or to grow nearer to a conclusion. As a simple rule of thumb if you write the sentence and need the phrase in on after the verb it s most likely home if not you probably need to use hone.