English homophones
Deng/dung
"Deng" is a name; "dung" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "Deng" arrives as a name, while "dung" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "Deng" is 4 letters, "dung" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across Deng, dung: dgn. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
Deng
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory degn · private e
dung
4 letters · 1 vowels · shape CVCC
Inventory dgnu · private u
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "Deng" when you mean: A common surname from Chinese, sometimes romanised as Teng, notably borne by Chinese politician Deng Xiaoping.
- Write "dung" when you mean: Manure; animal excrement.
Known mistypes of these spellings
Edit-distance variants recorded against this cluster: useful when a search or OCR feed lands on the wrong form.
Each spelling
Nearby English homophone groups
What to do next
You've reviewed the 2-spelling cluster (Deng, dung). Here's where to go from here.
- "dung" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #21,502 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 2 spellings ranks #133 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 2-spelling cluster: dependent · dependant. Nearby cluster
- Grammar often disambiguates this cluster, match the meaning to the part of speech before picking a spelling. Pick by meaning
PlainSpell is a reference corpus, not spelling advice. Verify unusual forms in context.