harvsharmWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: har is a adverb, harm is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#36,383
“har” frequency rank
#46,723
“harm” frequency rank
83106
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature har harm
Definition dort körperlicher oder geistiger Schaden

Letter map: har vs harm

Shared letters muted; letters that set har and harm apart highlighted. Shared run: 3. har runs 3 letters (CVC) against harm's 4 (CVCC) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

3 ch
har
4 ch
harm

Role in the sentence - har and harm

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: har is anadverb and harmanoun. On the page they differ by 1 extra letter(s) - “har” sits inside “harm”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 83106, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

har is recorded at frequency rank #36,383, classified as anadv, pronounced [hɛaɹ]. harm is at rank #46,723, 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 83106, this pair ranks #145,541 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of har vs harm

Shared letters: ahr. Private to "har": -. Private to "harm": m.

"har" · 3 letters · shape CVC  ·  "harm" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • harm ← ahrm · hamr · harmm · harrm · hharm · hram

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "har" and "harm" be used interchangeably?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "har" is an adverb and "harm" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary German text, does "har" or "harm" show up more?
"har" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #36,383 in our German list, against #46,723 for "harm". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "har" and "harm". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "har" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "harm" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #145,541 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "har" and "harm" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "harm 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 #145,541 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