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 529,999 confusable pairs and 2,182 homophone groups; 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
- 529,999
- confusable pairs
- 2,182
- homophone groups
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 2026). Definitions, IPA pronunciation, etymology and spelling corrections, free.
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
54,294 words
- P
P
46,516 words
- C
C
43,570 words
- M
M
36,575 words
- A
A
35,202 words
- B
B
31,241 words
- T
T
27,828 words
- D
D
26,416 words
- N
N
24,391 words
- H
H
23,837 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.