Which to use
“hound” and “hour” are a confusable English pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.
- #16,494
- “hound” frequency rank
- #675
- “hour” frequency rank
- 17169
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | hound | hour |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals. | A unit of time of one twenty-fourth of a day (sixty minutes). |
Where the eye mixes hound and hour
Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence.
Look-alike desk: hound vs hour
A purely visual mix-up. hound (/haʊnd/) and hour (/aʊə/) 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 17169, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
hound is recorded at frequency rank #16,494, classified as anoun, pronounced /haʊnd/. hour is at rank #675, tagged as anoun, pronounced /aʊə/.
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 17169, this pair ranks #453,176 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.
Orthographic DNA of hound vs hour
Shared letters: hou. Private to "hound": dn. Private to "hour": r.
"hound" · 5 letters · shape CVVCC · "hour" · 4 letters · shape CVVC
Known mistypes of this pair
Frequently Asked Questions
Do "hound" and "hour" mean the same thing in a sentence?
Frequency check: "hound" vs "hour" - which ranks higher?
After this comparison
Pronunciation already separates them, if the page still looks alike, the dictionary links below settle it.
- Full dictionary entry for "hound" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
- Full dictionary entry for "hour" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
- This pair ranks #453,176 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
- "hound" and "hour" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "hod vs hound". 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 #453,176 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.