of vs own, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“of” is a preposition and “own” is an adjective - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#324
“of” frequency rank: #19,664
“own” frequency rank: 19988
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	of	own
Definition	von	eigen

Letter map: of vs own

Shared letters muted; letters that set of and own apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

2 ch

3 ch

own

Part-of-speech tell for of / own

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: of is apreposition and ownanadjective. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 19988, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

of is recorded at frequency rank #324, classified as aprep, pronounced […]. own is at rank #19,664, tagged as anadj, pronounced [əʊn].

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 19988, this pair ranks #1,902,480 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of of vs own

Shared letters: o. Private to "of": f. Private to "own": nw.

"of" · 2 letters · shape VC · "own" · 3 letters · shape VCC

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "of" and "own" mean the same thing in a sentence?

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

In ordinary German text, does "of" or "own" show up more?

"of" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #324 in our German list, against #19,664 for "own". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "of" and "own".

Full dictionary entry for "of" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "own" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #1,902,480 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"of" and "own" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "OGH vs own". Nearby pair

Confusion rank #1,902,480 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.