signingvssinningWhich spelling fits?

Which to use

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

#3,654
“signing” frequency rank
#41,885
“sinning” frequency rank
45539
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature signing sinning
Definition The act of concluding a contract, especially by an athlete or entertainer with a company. The act of committing a sin.

Letter map: signing vs sinning

Shared letters muted; letters that set signing and sinning apart highlighted. Shared run: 6. signing and sinning follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (CVCCVCC). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.

7 ch
signing
7 ch
sinning

Spelling & dictionary notes on signing vs sinning

signing and sinning 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 a single letter - g in “signing” becomes n in “sinning”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 45539, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

signing is recorded at frequency rank #3,654, classified as anoun, pronounced /ˈsaɪnɪŋ/. sinning is at rank #41,885, tagged as anoun.

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 45539, this pair ranks #220,334 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of signing vs sinning

Shared letters: gins. Private to "signing": -. Private to "sinning": -.

"signing" · 7 letters · shape CVCCVCC  ·  "sinning" · 7 letters · shape CVCCVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • signing ← isgning · sgining · siggning · siginng · signign · signingg · signinng · signnig
  • sinning ← isnning · sining · sininng · sinnign · sinningg · sinninng · sinnnig · snining

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "signing" and "sinning" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No. They differ by a single letter - g in “signing” becomes n in “sinning”, but the dictionary glosses above give them different meanings, so swapping one for the other changes what the sentence says.
In ordinary English text, does "signing" or "sinning" show up more?
"signing" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #3,654 in our English list, against #41,885 for "sinning". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "signing" and "sinning". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "signing" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "sinning" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #220,334 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "signing" and "sinning" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "shunning vs sinning". 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 #220,334 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

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

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list