coopvscupWhich spelling fits?

Which to use

“coop” and “cup” are a confusable English pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.

#16,874
“coop” frequency rank
#805
“cup” frequency rank
17679
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature coop cup
Definition A basket, pen or enclosure for birds or small animals. A concave vessel for drinking, usually made of opaque material (as opposed to a glass) and with a handle.

Where the eye mixes coop and cup

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.

4 ch
coop
3 ch
cup

Look-alike desk: coop vs cup

A purely visual mix-up. coop (/kuːp/) and cup (/kʌp/) are said differently, so reading them aloud is the quickest way to catch the wrong one. On the page they stay close: they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 17679, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

coop is recorded at frequency rank #16,874, classified as anoun, pronounced /kuːp/. cup is at rank #805, tagged as anoun, pronounced /kʌp/.

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 17679, this pair ranks #449,849 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of coop vs cup

Shared letters: cp. Private to "coop": o. Private to "cup": u.

"coop" · 4 letters · shape CVVC  ·  "cup" · 3 letters · shape CVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • coopccoop · coopp · copo · ocop

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "coop" and "cup" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No. They are said differently (/kuːp/ versus /kʌp/) and carry different meanings; reading the sentence aloud is usually enough to catch the wrong one.
Which is more common, "coop" or "cup"?
"cup" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #805 in our English list, against #16,874 for "coop". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

Visual near-miss handled. Browse the word pages or a neighbour when the next look-alike shows up.

  • Full dictionary entry for "coop" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "cup" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #449,849 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "coop" and "cup" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "coms vs coop". Nearby pair
  • Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #449,849 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list