dear vs dei, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“dear” is an adjective and “dei” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#30,506
“dear” frequency rank: #7,028
“dei” frequency rank: 37534
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	dear	dei
Definition	lieb, teuer, süß, entzückend, reizend, herzig	Genitiv Singular des Substantivs deus

Letter map: dear vs dei

Shared letters muted; letters that set dear and dei apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

4 ch

dear

3 ch

dei

Role in the sentence - dear and dei

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: dear is anadjective and deianoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 37534, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

dear is recorded at frequency rank #30,506, classified as anadj, pronounced [diɹ]. dei is at rank #7,028, 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 37534, this pair ranks #1,587,705 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of dear vs dei

Shared letters: de. Private to "dear": ar. Private to "dei": i.

"dear" · 4 letters · shape CVVC · "dei" · 3 letters · shape CVV

Known mistypes of this pair

dear ← ddear · dearr · dera · edar

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "dear" and "dei" mean the same thing in a sentence?

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

Which is more common, "dear" or "dei"?

"dei" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #7,028 in our German list, against #30,506 for "dear". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "dear" and "dei". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "dear" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "dei" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,587,705 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"dear" and "dei" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "dear vs dörr". 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 #1,587,705 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.