Which to use
“excellent” is an adjective and “excellently” is an adverb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.
- #1,896
- “excellent” frequency rank
- #38,831
- “excellently” frequency rank
- 40727
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | excellent | excellently |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Having excelled, having surpassed. | In a manner that demonstrates excellence; very well. |
Letter map: excellent vs excellently
Shared letters muted; letters that set excellent and excellently apart highlighted. Shared run: 9. excellent runs 9 letters (VCCVCCVCC) against excellently's 11 (VCCVCCVCCCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.
Part-of-speech tell for excellent / excellently
Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: excellent is anadjective and excellentlyanadverb. On the page they differ by 2 extra letter(s) - “excellent” sits inside “excellently”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 40727, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
excellent is recorded at frequency rank #1,896, classified as anadj, pronounced /ˈɛksələnt/. excellently is at rank #38,831, tagged as anadv.
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 40727, this pair ranks #264,929 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.
Orthographic DNA of excellent vs excellently
Shared letters: celntx. Private to "excellent": -. Private to "excellently": y.
"excellent" · 9 letters · shape VCCVCCVCC · "excellently" · 11 letters · shape VCCVCCVCCCV
Known mistypes of this pair
- excellent ← ecxellent · exccellent · excelelnt · excelent · excellennt · excellentt · excelletn · excellnet
- excellently ← ecxellently · exccellently · excelelntly · excelently · excellenlty · excellenntly · excellentlly · excellentlyy
Frequently Asked Questions
Do "excellent" and "excellently" mean the same thing in a sentence?
In ordinary English text, does "excellent" or "excellently" show up more?
After this comparison
Pair "excellent" vs "excellently" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.
- Full dictionary entry for "excellent" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
- Full dictionary entry for "excellently" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
- This pair ranks #264,929 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
- "excellent" and "excellently" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "excellency vs excellently". 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 #264,929 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.