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A homonym is a word which shares the same pronunciation as another word or words, but has a different spelling, e.g. "to", "too", "two".
I wonder why languages have homonyms in the first place. What is the use of them, from an evolution of language standpoint? Surely a word with a unique spelling and pronunciation would engender less confusion when heard than a homonym?
In the first place, what are called homonyms often aren't. For (your) example, to is only homonymous with too and two when it's unnaturally stressed— ordinarily it's /tÉ™/, not /tu/. Others are homonymous only in certain dialects: merry, marry and Mary are often cited as homonyms, but they have distinct pronunciations in my native speech.
More importantly, there are few homonyms which cannot be distinguished in context. Many belong to different word classes. Again, your example lists a preposition, a quantifier and an adverb; they're going to play entirely distinct syntactic roles. And even homonyms which belong to the same word class will usually be used in contrasting semantic or pragmatic domains—how likely are you to encounter an utterance in which balled and bawled could possibly be confused? Such contextual distinctiveness is far more important than mere phonic similarity; in Real Life, as opposed to dictionaries and taxonomies, phonic phenomena only phenomenate in discourse contexts. In evolutionary terms, these synonyms inhabit different ecological niches, so they do not compete for lexical resources.
I could imagine that many homonyms start off as polysemes but can synchronically no longer be recognised as such, so originally the n:1 relation was unproblematic because there was a clear relation between the different shades of meaning, but over time (and in contact with other languages, new words, the need for new terminology, ...) that connection got lost and from a nowadays standpoint it seems implausible why "the language" didn't invent a seperate word for an apperently totally unrelated concept.
