away vs by, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“away” is an adverb and “by” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#15,565
“away” frequency rank: #1,627
“by” frequency rank: 17192
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	away	by
Definition	weg, fort, abwesend	Stadt

Letter map: away vs by

Shared letters muted; letters that set away and by apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

4 ch

away

2 ch

Part-of-speech tell for away / by

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: away is anadverb and byanoun. On the page they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 17192, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

away is recorded at frequency rank #15,565, classified as anadv, pronounced […]. by is at rank #1,627, tagged as anoun, pronounced […].

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 17192, this pair ranks #1,929,572 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of away vs by

Shared letters: y. Private to "away": aw. Private to "by": b.

"away" · 4 letters · shape VCVV · "by" · 2 letters · shape CV

Known mistypes of this pair

away ← aawy · awayy · awway · awya · waay

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "away" for "by" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "away" is an adverb and "by" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

Frequency check: "away" vs "by" - which ranks higher?

"by" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #1,627 in our German list, against #15,565 for "away". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

What to do next

Pair "away" vs "by" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

Full dictionary entry for "away" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "by" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,929,572 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"away" and "by" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "away vs puzzles". Nearby pair
Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #1,929,572 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.