Sun and son - are they the same?

You might think that two words written with different vowels would be pronounced differently. But in fact the words “sun” and “son” sound exactly the same in standard English pronunciation - you just have to check in the dictionary and you’ll find they’re both written in phonetics like this: /sʌn/. This is because the letter “O” isn’t always pronounced in the same way, as we can see for example with the words “clock”, “phone” and “come”. The “O” in “son” is pronounced like the one in “come”. There are other words like this too: cover, mother, love, recovery, above. In all of these words the “O” is pronounced as /ʌ/. So how can we understand if we’re talking about “sun” or “son”? Don’t worry, it’s generally clear from the context.