readyvsreplyWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: ready is a adjective, reply is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#18,370
“ready” frequency rank
#29,757
“reply” frequency rank
48127
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature ready reply
Definition bereit, fertig Antwort

Letter map: ready vs reply

Shared letters muted; letters that set ready and reply apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

5 ch
ready
5 ch
reply

Part-of-speech tell for ready / reply

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: ready is anadjective and replyanoun. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 48127, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

ready is recorded at frequency rank #18,370, classified as anadj, pronounced […]. reply is at rank #29,757, tagged as anoun, pronounced [rɪˈplaɪ].

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 48127, this pair ranks #1,259,858 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of ready vs reply

Shared letters: ery. Private to "ready": ad. Private to "reply": lp.

"ready" · 5 letters · shape CVVCV  ·  "reply" · 5 letters · shape CVCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • readyerady · raedy · readdy · readyy · reayd · reday · rready
  • replyerply · relpy · replly · replyy · repply · repyl · rpely · rreply

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "ready" for "reply" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "ready" is an adjective and "reply" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Which is more common, "ready" or "reply"?
"ready" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #18,370 in our German list, against #29,757 for "reply". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Pair "ready" vs "reply" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

  • Full dictionary entry for "ready" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "reply" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #1,259,858 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "ready" and "reply" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "puzzles vs ready". 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 #1,259,858 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