Which to use
“hour” and “hug” are a confusable English pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.
- #675
- “hour” frequency rank
- #6,147
- “hug” frequency rank
- 6822
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | hour | hug |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | A unit of time of one twenty-fourth of a day (sixty minutes). | A close embrace, especially when charged with an emotion such as affection, joy, relief, lust, anger, aggression, compassion, and the like, as opposed to being characterized by formality, equivocation or ambivalence (a half-embrace or "little hug"). |
Where the eye mixes hour and hug
Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
A purely visual mix-up. hour (/aʊə/) and hug (/hʌɡ/) 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 6822, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
hour is recorded at frequency rank #675, classified as anoun, pronounced /aʊə/. hug is at rank #6,147, tagged as anoun, pronounced /hʌɡ/.
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 6822, this pair ranks #509,814 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.
Orthographic DNA of hour vs hug
Shared letters: hu. Private to "hour": or. Private to "hug": g.
"hour" · 4 letters · shape CVVC · "hug" · 3 letters · shape CVC
Known mistypes of this pair
- hour ← hhour · horu · hourr · huor · ohur