harbour vs open, What's the Difference?

Which to use

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

#46,722
“harbour” frequency rank: #2,607
“open” frequency rank: 49329
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	harbour	open
Definition	Hafen	etwas ist nicht geschlossen

Letter map: harbour vs open

Shared letters muted; letters that set harbour and open apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

7 ch

harbour

4 ch

open

Part-of-speech tell for harbour / open

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: harbour is anoun and openanadjective. On the page they differ by 3 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 49329, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

harbour is recorded at frequency rank #46,722, classified as anoun, 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 49329, this pair ranks #1,215,573 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of harbour vs open

Shared letters: o. Private to "harbour": abhru. Private to "open": enp.

"harbour" · 7 letters · shape CVCCVVC · "open" · 4 letters · shape VCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

harbour ← ahrbour · habrour · harbbour · harboru · harbourr · harbuor · harobur · harrbour
open ← oepn · openn · opne · oppen · poen

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "harbour" and "open" be used interchangeably?

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

Which is more common, "harbour" or "open"?

"open" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #2,607 in our German list, against #46,722 for "harbour". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "harbour" and "open".

Full dictionary entry for "harbour" 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 #1,215,573 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"harbour" and "open" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "harbour 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 #1,215,573 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.