English homophones
raining/reigning
"raining" is a verb; "reigning" is an adjective - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "raining" arrives as a verb, while "reigning" is an adjective. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "raining" is 7 letters, "reigning" is 8; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across raining, reigning: ginr. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
raining
7 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCVCC
Inventory aginr · private a
reigning
8 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCVCC
Inventory eginr · private e
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "raining" when you mean: present participle and gerund of rain
- Write "reigning" when you mean: Currently ruling or holding a position.
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 (raining, reigning). Here's where to go from here.
- "raining" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #10,917 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: roots · routes. 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.