English homophones
vain/vane/vein
"vain" is an adjective; "vane" is a noun - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #30 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "vain" arrives as an adjective, while "vane" is a noun. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "va" then splits - "vain" (4 letters) vs "vane" (4).
- No shared spelling stem: "vain" is 4 letters, "vein" is 4; only the sound ties them.
- No shared spelling stem: "vane" is 4 letters, "vein" is 4; only the sound ties them.
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across vain, vane, vein: nv. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
vain
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory ainv · private ai
vane
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVCV
Inventory aenv · private ae
vein
4 letters · 2 vowels · shape CVVC
Inventory einv · private ei
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "vain" when you mean: Overly proud of oneself, especially concerning appearance; having a high opinion of one's own accomplishments with slight reason.
- Write "vane" when you mean: A weather vane.
- Write "vein" when you mean: A blood vessel that transports blood from the capillaries back to the heart.
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 (vain, vane, vein). Here's where to go from here.
- "vein" is the most frequent headword in this 3-spelling cluster (rank #10,148 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: veil · vale · vail. 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.