CrvscrewTell them apart

Quick tell: Cr is a abbrev, crew is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“Cr” is an abbrev and “crew” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#21,936
“Cr” frequency rank
#6,171
“crew” frequency rank
28107
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature Cr crew
Definition Chrom Belegschaft

Letter map: Cr vs crew

Shared letters muted; letters that set Cr and crew apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

2 ch
Cr
4 ch
crew

Part-of-speech tell for Cr / crew

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: Cr is anabbrev and crewanoun. On the page they differ by 2 extra letter(s) - “Cr” sits inside “crew”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 28107, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

Cr is recorded at frequency rank #21,936, classified as anabbrev. crew is at rank #6,171, 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 28107, this pair ranks #1,790,427 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of Cr vs crew

Shared letters: cr. Private to "Cr": -. Private to "crew": ew.

"Cr" · 2 letters · shape CC  ·  "crew" · 4 letters · shape CCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • crewccrew · cerw · creww · crrew · crwe · rcew

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "Cr" for "crew" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "Cr" is an abbrev and "crew" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary German text, does "Cr" or "crew" show up more?
"crew" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #6,171 in our German list, against #21,936 for "Cr". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "Cr" and "crew". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "Cr" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "crew" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #1,790,427 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "Cr" and "crew" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "carr vs Cr". 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 #1,790,427 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list