looking vs TO, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“looking” is a verb and “TO” is an abbrev - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#27,829
“looking” frequency rank: #589
“TO” frequency rank: 28418
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	looking	TO
Definition	Partizip Präsens (present participle) des Verbs look	KFZ-Kennzeichen für Torino (Turin)

Letter map: looking vs TO

Shared letters muted; letters that set looking and TO apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

7 ch

looking

2 ch

Part-of-speech tell for looking / TO

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: looking is averb and TOanabbrev. On the page they differ by 5 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 28418, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

looking is recorded at frequency rank #27,829, classified as averb, pronounced […]. TO is at rank #589, tagged as anabbrev, 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 28418, this pair ranks #1,785,136 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of looking vs TO

Shared letters: o. Private to "looking": gikln. Private to "TO": t.

"looking" · 7 letters · shape CVVCVCC · "TO" · 2 letters · shape CV

Known mistypes of this pair

looking ← llooking · loking · lokoing · looikng · lookign · lookingg · lookinng · lookking

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "looking" for "TO" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "looking" is a verb and "TO" an abbrev, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

Which is more common, "looking" or "TO"?

"TO" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #589 in our German list, against #27,829 for "looking". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

Pair "looking" vs "TO" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

Full dictionary entry for "looking" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "TO" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,785,136 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"looking" and "TO" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "looking 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 #1,785,136 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.