meaningvsopenWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: meaning is a verb, open is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#41,340
“meaning” frequency rank
#2,607
“open” frequency rank
43947
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature meaning open
Definition Partizip Präsens (present participle) des Verbs mean etwas ist nicht geschlossen

Letter map: meaning vs open

Shared letters muted; letters that set meaning and open apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

7 ch
meaning
4 ch
open

Part-of-speech tell for meaning / open

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: meaning is averb and openanadjective. On the page they differ by 3 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 43947, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

meaning is recorded at frequency rank #41,340, classified as averb, 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 43947, this pair ranks #1,401,969 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of meaning vs open

Shared letters: en. Private to "meaning": agim. Private to "open": op.

"meaning" · 7 letters · shape CVVCVCC  ·  "open" · 4 letters · shape VCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • meaningemaning · maening · meainng · meanign · meaningg · meaninng · meannig · meanning
  • openoepn · openn · opne · oppen · poen

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "meaning" and "open" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "meaning" is a verb and "open" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Frequency check: "meaning" vs "open" - which ranks higher?
"open" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #2,607 in our German list, against #41,340 for "meaning". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

You've compared "meaning" and "open". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "meaning" 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 #1,401,969 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "meaning" and "open" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "meaning 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 #1,401,969 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