Cheap or cheep?
cheap is an adjective meaning “Low or reduced in price”; cheep is a verb meaning “Of a small bird, to make short, high-pitched sounds”. Use cheap as an adjective and cheep as a verb. They sound the same (/ˈt͡ʃiːp/). In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) cheap is about 174 times as common as cheep.
What is the difference between cheap and cheep?
| cheap | cheep | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | adjective, noun, verb, adverb | verb, noun, interjection |
| Meaning | Low or reduced in price Of poor quality | Of a small bird, to make short, high-pitched sounds To express in a chirping tone A short, high-pitched sound made by a small bird |
| Example | a writer of cheap romances | none recorded |
| Forms | cheaper, cheapest | cheeps, cheeping, cheeped |
| Pronunciation | /ˈt͡ʃiːp/ [ˈt͡ʃʰɪi̯p] | /t͡ʃiːp/ |
| In writing | 51 times per million words | about once in every 3 million words |
Sources: cheap and cheep in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of cheap and cheep
cheap
- 1
Low or reduced in price
- 2
Of poor quality
a writer of cheap romances
- 3
Of little worth
- 4
slangUnderhanded or unfair
the cheap trick of hiding deadly lava under pushable blocks
- 5
derogatoryinformalStingy; mean; excessively frugal
Insurance is expensive, but don't be so cheap that you risk losing your home because of a fire
- 6
Trading at a price level which is low relative to historical trends, a similar asset, or (for derivatives) a theoretical value
The ETF is trading cheap to NAV right now; we can arb this by buying the ETF and selling the underlying constituents
- 7
Taking little of system time or resources
the algorithm is cheap to compute
cheep
- 1
Of a small bird, to make short, high-pitched sounds
- 2
A short, high-pitched sound made by a small bird
- 3
The short, high-pitched sound made by a small bird
- 4
To express in a chirping tone
- 5
A similar-sounding short high-pitched sound
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, cheap or cheep?
cheap appears 51 times per million words; cheep about once in every 3 million words.
cheap 51 times per million wordscheep about once in every 3 million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search cheap vs cheep?
“cheap vs cheep” is searched about 320 times a month on Google and 20 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“cheep vs cheap”, “cheap or cheep”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.