con vs cons, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“con” is a noun and “cons” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#8,694
“con” frequency rank: #43,090
“cons” frequency rank: 51784
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	con	cons
Definition	Betrug, Betrügerei, Schwindel	3. Person Singular Indikativ Präsens Aktiv des Verbs con

Letter map: con vs cons

Shared letters muted; letters that set con and cons apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

3 ch

con

4 ch

cons

Part-of-speech tell for con / cons

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: con is anoun and consaverb. On the page they differ by 1 extra letter(s) - “con” sits inside “cons”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 51784, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

con is recorded at frequency rank #8,694, classified as anoun. cons is at rank #43,090, tagged as averb, 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 51784, this pair ranks #1,122,160 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of con vs cons

Shared letters: cno. Private to "con": -. Private to "cons": s.

"con" · 3 letters · shape CVC · "cons" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

cons ← ccons · cnos · conns · conss · cosn · ocns

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "con" and "cons" mean the same thing in a sentence?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "con" is a noun and "cons" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

Which is more common, "con" or "cons"?

"con" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #8,694 in our German list, against #43,090 for "cons". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "con" and "cons". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "con" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "cons" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,122,160 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"con" and "cons" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "cons 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 #1,122,160 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.