Homographs: how to deal with them?


For example:

>   * 一日{いちにち} = one day (duration);
>   * 一日{ついたち} = first day of the month.
>

First of all, are the meanings correct? Because I found contradicting answers.  
I suspect the meanings are overlapping in some cases?

Then, after a quick search, I found out that _okurigana_ is efficient to
disambiguate them. Didn't the author mean _furigana_ instead? Maybe I didn't
grasp something here.

Lastly, what are the most important (to know)/most frequent homographic Kanji
out there?




> First of all, are the meanings correct?

Yes, you are right.

> Then, after a quick search, I found out that okurigana is efficient to
> disambiguate them. Didn't the author mean furigana instead?

Yes, he's wrong.

> Lastly, what are the most important (to know)/most frequent homographic
> Kanji out there?

Err, all the X中, where 中 is read ちゅう or じゅう.  
And also

> 今日 -- こんにち(today, nowadays, or in "こんにちは")/きょう(today),  
>  明日 -- あす/あした/みょうにち、  
>  昨日 -- さくじつ/きのう  
>  今年 -- こんねん/ことし…

Basically, the "on.yomi" is more formal than the other readings.

I have no idea how to rank anything (which I can't even remember) by
importance… I'd like to say that there aren't that many, and that answering
would be vain, barely a useful information (if you ignore proper nouns…)

