# eth vs Ethan

> English confusable word pair

## The two words

### eth
*noun · IPA /ɛð/ · frequency rank #22,077*
A letter (capital Ð, small ð) introduced into Old English to represent its dental fricative, then not distinguished from the letter thorn, no longer used in English but still in modern use in Icelandic, the IPA and other phonetic alphabets to represent the voiced dental fricative "th" sound as in the English word then. The letter is also used in Faroese, but is generally silent in that language.

### Ethan
*name · IPA /ˈiːθən/ · frequency rank #11,206*
A male given name from Hebrew, of mostly American usage since the 18th century; popular in the 2000s.

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/vs/eth-vs-ethan