away vs open, What's the Difference?

Which to use

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

#15,565
“away” frequency rank: #2,607
“open” frequency rank: 18172
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	away	open
Definition	weg, fort, abwesend	etwas ist nicht geschlossen

Letter map: away vs open

Shared letters muted; letters that set away and open apart highlighted. No shared letter run.

4 ch

away

4 ch

open

Part-of-speech tell for away / open

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: away is anadverb and openanadjective. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 4 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 18172, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

away is recorded at frequency rank #15,565, classified as anadv, pronounced […]. open is at rank #2,607, tagged as anadj, 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 18172, this pair ranks #1,920,736 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of away vs open

Shared letters: none. Private to "away": awy. Private to "open": enop.

"away" · 4 letters · shape VCVV · "open" · 4 letters · shape VCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

away ← aawy · awayy · awway · awya · waay
open ← oepn · openn · opne · oppen · poen

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "away" and "open" mean the same thing in a sentence?

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

In ordinary German text, does "away" or "open" show up more?

"open" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #2,607 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.

After this comparison

Pair "away" vs "open" 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 "open" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,920,736 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"away" and "open" 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 #1,920,736 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.