homevshopesWhat's the difference?

Which to use

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

#149
“home” frequency rank
#3,630
“hopes” frequency rank
3779
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature home hopes
Definition A dwelling. plural of hope

Where the eye mixes home and hopes

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence.

4 ch
home
5 ch
hopes

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

A purely visual mix-up. home (/həʊm/) and hopes (/hoʊps/) 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 3779, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

home is recorded at frequency rank #149, classified as anoun, pronounced /həʊm/. hopes is at rank #3,630, tagged as anoun, pronounced /hoʊps/.

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 3779, this pair ranks #521,022 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of home vs hopes

Shared letters: eho. Private to "home": m. Private to "hopes": ps.

"home" · 4 letters · shape CVCV  ·  "hopes" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • homehhome · hmoe · hoem · ohme
  • hopeshhopes · hoeps · hopess · hoppes · hopse · hpoes · ohpes

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "home" and "hopes" be used interchangeably?
No. They are said differently (/həʊm/ versus /hoʊps/) and carry different meanings; reading the sentence aloud is usually enough to catch the wrong one.
Which is more common, "home" or "hopes"?
"home" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #149 in our English list, against #3,630 for "hopes". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

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

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list