Which to use
“her” is a determiner and “hey” is an intj - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.
- #58
- “her” frequency rank
- #787
- “hey” frequency rank
- 845
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | her | hey |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Belonging to her (belonging to that female person or animal, or in poetic or old-fashioned language that ship, city, season, etc). | An exclamation to get attention. |
Where the eye mixes her and hey
Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: her is /ˈhɜː/ while hey is /heɪ/. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they differ by a single letter - r in “her” becomes y in “hey”, and the parts of speech differ too (determiner vs intj), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 845, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
her is recorded at frequency rank #58, classified as adet, pronounced /ˈhɜː/. hey is at rank #787, tagged as anintj, pronounced /heɪ/.
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 845, this pair ranks #528,655 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.
Orthographic DNA of her vs hey
Shared letters: eh. Private to "her": r. Private to "hey": y.
"her" · 3 letters · shape CVC · "hey" · 3 letters · shape CVV