English homophones
sinking/syncing
"sinking" is a noun; "syncing" is a verb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "sinking" arrives as a noun, while "syncing" is a verb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- No shared spelling stem: "sinking" is 7 letters, "syncing" is 7; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across sinking, syncing: gins. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
sinking
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCVCC
Inventory gikns · private k
syncing
7 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCCVCC
Inventory cginsy · private cy
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "sinking" when you mean: gerund of sink: the process by which something sinks, or is sunk.
- Write "syncing" when you mean: present participle and gerund of sync
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 (sinking, syncing). Here's where to go from here.
- "sinking" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #9,251 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: seek · Sikh. 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.