English homophones
peaking/peeking/Peking
"peaking" is a verb; "Peking" is a name - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "peaking" arrives as a verb, while "Peking" is a name. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "pe" then splits - "peaking" (7 letters) vs "peeking" (7).
- Shared stem "pe" then splits - "peaking" (7 letters) vs "Peking" (6).
- Shared stem "pe" then splits - "peeking" (7 letters) vs "Peking" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across peaking, peeking, Peking: egiknp. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
peaking
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVCC
Inventory aegiknp · private a
peeking
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVCC
Inventory egiknp · no private letters vs siblings
Peking
6 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCVCC
Inventory egiknp · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "peaking" when you mean: present participle and gerund of peak
- Write "peeking" when you mean: present participle and gerund of peek
- Write "Peking" when you mean: Dated form of Beijing: a direct-administered municipality, the capital city of China.
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 3-spelling cluster (peaking, peeking, Peking). Here's where to go from here.
- "Peking" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #23,058 in English). Full entry
- Among English homophone groups, a cluster of 3 spellings ranks #30 by size (1,007 groups in this vintage). Corpus statistics
- Explore a nearby 3-spelling cluster: prior · Pryor · Praia. 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.