mai vs my, What's the Difference?

Which to use

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

#14,361
“mai” frequency rank: #27
“my” frequency rank: 14388
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	mai	my
Definition	Alternative form of my.	First-person singular possessive determiner. See Appendix:Possessive#English.

Letter map: mai vs my

Shared letters muted; letters that set mai and my apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

3 ch

mai

2 ch

Corpus notes: mai and my

mai and my are indexed as a confusable English pair. We have no recorded pronunciation or part of speech for both members, so the spelling overlap is what we can show you: they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 14388, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

mai is recorded at frequency rank #14,361, classified as adet. my is at rank #27, tagged as adet, pronounced /maɪ/.

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 14388, this pair ranks #470,332 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of mai vs my

Shared letters: m. Private to "mai": ai. Private to "my": y.

"mai" · 3 letters · shape CVV · "my" · 2 letters · shape CV

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "mai" for "my" ever safe?

No. They differ by 1 letter(s) in length, but the dictionary glosses above give them different meanings, so swapping one for the other changes what the sentence says.

Which is more common, "mai" or "my"?

"my" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #27 in our English list, against #14,361 for "mai". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "mai" and "my". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "mai" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "my" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #470,332 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"mai" and "my" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "mai vs MPAA". Nearby pair

Confusion rank #470,332 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.