withinvszoosWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: within is a preposition, zoos is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“within” is a preposition and “zoos” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#29,872
“within” frequency rank
#26,259
“zoos” frequency rank
56131
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature within zoos
Definition innerhalb, in Plural des Substantivs zoo

Letter map: within vs zoos

Shared letters muted; letters that set within and zoos apart highlighted. No shared letter run.

6 ch
within
4 ch
zoos

Part-of-speech tell for within / zoos

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: within is apreposition and zoosanoun. On the page they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 56131, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

within is recorded at frequency rank #29,872, classified as aprep, pronounced […]. zoos is at rank #26,259, 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 56131, this pair ranks #952,239 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of within vs zoos

Shared letters: none. Private to "within": hintw. Private to "zoos": osz.

"within" · 6 letters · shape CVCCVC  ·  "zoos" · 4 letters · shape CVVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • withiniwthin · wihtin · withhin · withinn · withni · witihn · witthin · wtihin
  • zoosozos · zooss · zos · zoso · zzoos

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "within" and "zoos" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "within" is a preposition and "zoos" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary German text, does "within" or "zoos" show up more?
"zoos" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #26,259 in our German list, against #29,872 for "within". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "within" and "zoos".

  • Full dictionary entry for "within" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "zoos" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #952,239 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "within" and "zoos" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "puzzles vs within". 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 #952,239 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