English homophones
weakly/weekly
"weakly" is an adjective; "weekly" is an adverb - grammar picks the spelling, not sound. Size rank #133 of 1,007 English groups.
Data vintage
Grammar picks the spelling
Same sound, different grammar: "weakly" arrives as an adjective, while "weekly" is an adverb. Once the sentence role is fixed, only one spelling fits.
Spelling pairs in this cluster
- Shared stem "we" then splits - "weakly" (6 letters) vs "weekly" (6).
Orthographic DNA of this cluster
Shared letters across weakly, weekly: eklwy. Private letters are the ones only one spelling owns: the eye's fastest tell once sound is out of the picture.
weakly
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory aeklwy · private a
weekly
6 letters · 3 vowels · shape CVVCCV
Inventory eklwy · no private letters vs siblings
Pick the spelling from the meaning
- Write "weakly" when you mean: Frail, sickly or of a delicate constitution; weak.
- Write "weekly" when you mean: Once every week.
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 (weakly, weekly). Here's where to go from here.
- "weekly" is the most frequent headword in this 2-spelling cluster (rank #2,653 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: wear · ware. 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.