[simiones]

The dialects of English (such as Scots) most certainly do not spell words the same as a general rule. The fact that there are slight pronunciation differences between different accents of standard English is not at all the same as writing entirely different words with the same sequence of characters.

For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".

[russdill]

The influence of loan words on English give vastly different pronunciations of words even regionally. For extreme examples see "shibboleth", especially in the UK.

[simiones]

What I've found with some cursory googling is mostly place names, which I agree often have major differences between spelling and pronunciation. Even there, many of the examples on the Wikipedia page are still plausible spellings for the pronunciation, especially given how ambiguous English spelling is in the first place. Others seem more like nicknames that have essentially replaced the original full name of the place, while the full name is conserved in the spelling.