lettenvspurposeWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: letten is a verb, purpose is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#46,806
“letten” frequency rank
#49,985
“purpose” frequency rank
96791
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature letten purpose
Definition Partizip Perfekt (past participle) des Verbs let Absicht, Ziel, Zweck, Vorsatz

Letter map: letten vs purpose

Shared letters muted; letters that set letten and purpose apart highlighted. Shared run: 1. letten runs 6 letters (CVCCVC) against purpose's 7 (CVCCVCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

6 ch
letten
7 ch
purpose

Part-of-speech tell for letten / purpose

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: letten is averb and purposeanoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 96791, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

letten is recorded at frequency rank #46,806, classified as averb, pronounced […]. purpose is at rank #49,985, 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 96791, this pair ranks #5,980 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of letten vs purpose

Shared letters: e. Private to "letten": lnt. Private to "purpose": oprsu.

"letten" · 6 letters · shape CVCCVC  ·  "purpose" · 7 letters · shape CVCCVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • letten ← eltten · leten · letetn · lettenn · lettne · lletten · lteten
  • purpose ← ppurpose · prupose · puprose · puropse · purpoes · purposse · purppose · purpsoe

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "letten" for "purpose" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "letten" is a verb and "purpose" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Which is more common, "letten" or "purpose"?
"letten" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #46,806 in our German list, against #49,985 for "purpose". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "letten" and "purpose". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "letten" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "purpose" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #5,980 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "letten" and "purpose" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "purpose 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 #5,980 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