Which to use
“injure” is a verb and “injury” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.
- #20,392
- “injure” frequency rank
- #1,865
- “injury” frequency rank
- 22257
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | injure | injury |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | To wound or cause physical harm to a living creature. | Damage to the body of a living thing. |
Where the eye mixes injure and injury
Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 5 letters in sequence. injure and injury follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (VCCVCV). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.
Look-alike desk: injure vs injury
These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: injure is /ˈɪn.d͡ʒɚ/ while injury is /ˈɪn.d͡ʒə.ɹi/. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they differ by a single letter - e in “injure” becomes y in “injury”, and the parts of speech differ too (verb vs noun), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 22257, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
injure is recorded at frequency rank #20,392, classified as averb, pronounced /ˈɪn.d͡ʒɚ/. injury is at rank #1,865, tagged as anoun, pronounced /ˈɪn.d͡ʒə.ɹi/.
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 22257, this pair ranks #417,915 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.
Orthographic DNA of injure vs injury
Shared letters: ijnru. Private to "injure": e. Private to "injury": y.
"injure" · 6 letters · shape VCCVCV · "injury" · 6 letters · shape VCCVCV
Known mistypes of this pair
Frequently Asked Questions
Is swapping "injure" for "injury" ever safe?
In ordinary English text, does "injure" or "injury" show up more?
Useful next steps
Eye-level mix-up between "injure" and "injury" is sorted above. Next: full entries or other pairs that share a letter shape.
- Full dictionary entry for "injure" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
- Full dictionary entry for "injury" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
- This pair ranks #417,915 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
- "injure" and "injury" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "injure vs Inoue". 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 #417,915 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.