sie
[ziː]
The verdict
“sie” is in the everyday core of German, ranked #18 in German word frequency and used as a pronoun.
- #18
- frequency rank, German
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - Personalpronomen 3. Person Femininum Singular, welches eine zuvor benutzte Nominalphrase im Femininum (Person, Tier, Sache oder Abstraktum) ersetzt oder bei fehlendem oder weit entferntem Bezugswor...
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | sie |
| Language | German |
| Part of speech | Pronoun |
| IPA | [ziː] |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #18 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “sie” sits in German frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The German entry for sie is 3 letters long, classified as a pronoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as [ziː]. Corpus data places it at rank #18 in overall German word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language. Wiktionary records 3 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for sie, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "so", "SV", "SS", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is best read as a straightforward mapping from sound to letter. The correct German form is sie, spelled S-I-E.
Definition
- 1Personalpronomen 3. Person Femininum Singular, welches eine zuvor benutzte Nominalphrase im Femininum (Person, Tier, Sache oder Abstraktum) ersetzt oder bei fehlendem oder weit entferntem Bezugswort auf eine Person weiblichen natürlichen Geschlechts verweist
- 2Personalpronomen 3. Person alle Genera Plural, welches eine zuvor benutzte Nominalphrase im Plural (Personen, Tiere, Sachen oder Abstrakta) ersetzt oder direkt auf mehrere Personen verweist
- 3Personalpronomen 3. Person alle Genera Plural, welches auf nicht näher bezeichnete Personen verweist; Unbekannte oder man
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 German corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “sie”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct German spelling is S-I-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Say it as [ziː] (IPA); tap the speaker on the pronunciation badge to hear it where audio exists.
- Don't mix it up with “so” - see the side-by-side comparison. sie vs so
- Browse more German words and confusable pairs in the same reference. German words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.