English
A free English word reference: definitions, IPA pronunciation, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections from the open Wiktionary corpus.
English at a glance
PlainSpell indexes 545,755 English words with 530,003 confusable pairs and 2,182 homophones; more English words begin with “S” than any other letter, and “their vs there” is the pair most likely to be confused.
- 545,755
- English words
- 530,003
- confusable pairs
- 2,182
- homophones
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 2026). Definitions, IPA pronunciation, etymology and spelling corrections, free.
Where English sits by word inventory
English indexes 545,755 headwords among 5 languages (corpus inventory, not a quality ranking). Orthogonal to the letter and length charts below.
English vs all languages by word count
Where this language's indexed vocabulary sits among every PlainSpell language
545,755 4th of 5 higher than 1 of 5 languages
Languages, banded by headword inventory
Each bar is a band; taller bars hold more languages. The dashed line + filled bar mark this entry. Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share, and where it sits relative to this entry.
Source Wiktionary (CC BY-SA) via PlainSpell · 2026-09-03
English homophone groups by size
Exclusive cut of 1,007 English homophone groups by member count. Orthogonal to the initial-letter chart and word-length distribution below.
Browse A–Z
Which letters start the most English words?
Most common initial letters in English
Top 10 letters, ranked by how many indexed words begin with each
- S
S
6,566 words
- C
C
5,599 words
- P
P
4,417 words
- B
B
4,121 words
- M
M
4,057 words
- A
A
3,931 words
- D
D
3,470 words
- T
T
3,151 words
- R
R
3,094 words
- H
H
2,646 words
How long are English words?
English word lengths
62,721 words by word length (letters); the ranking above is drawn from the right-hand tail
word length (letters) →
What this showsEnglish vocabulary clusters around the middle lengths; the very short and very long words are a small minority of the indexed corpus.
Most Common Words
Most Confused Pairs
- 1theirvsthere
- 2thanvsthen
- 3loosevslose
- 4advicevsadvise
- 5complementvscompliment
- 6weathervswhether
- 7principalvsprinciple
- 8desertvsdessert
- 9quietvsquite
- 10brakevsbreak
Top 5 confusable pairs at a glance
Ranked by composite frequency × visual-similarity score. Higher bar = more likely to cause real-world substitution.
Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) English confusables export · Q2 2026 Confusable scores combine word-frequency rank and Damerau–Levenshtein similarity.
Explore English
Three ways into the corpus from here.
- Look up any English word for its definition, IPA pronunciation, etymology and misspellings. Browse English A–Z
- Settle a confusable pair, which spelling means what, compared side by side. Confusable pairs
- See the cross-language rankings: hardest to spell, most confusable, largest homophone groups. Rankings
Source & data vintage
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) English headword + definitions corpus · Q2 2026 Aggregated and indexed via kaikki.org dictionary export. Confusable pairs are computed; homophone groups are derived from IPA matches.
Every English figure on this page is counted directly from the PlainSpell database. How each field is sourced, derived, and corrected is documented in our methodology and editorial & corrections policy. Spotted an error? Report a correction.