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Stellar or steller?

stellar is an adjective meaning “Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of stars”; steller is a noun meaning “Steller's sea cow, an extinct sirenian”. Use stellar as an adjective and steller as a noun. They sound the same (/ˈstɛl.ə/). In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) stellar is about 49 times as common as steller.

stellarorsteller

What is the difference between stellar and steller?

stellarsteller
Part of speechadjectivenoun
Meaning

Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of stars

Heavenly

Steller's sea cow, an extinct sirenian

ExampleThe actress gave a stellar performancenone recorded
Formsnonestellers
Pronunciation/ˈstɛl.ə/ /ˈstɛl.əɹ//ˈstɛlə/ /ˈstɛləɹ/
In writing5.8 times per million wordsabout once in every 9 million words

Sources: stellar and steller in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Every current meaning of stellar and steller

stellar

  1. 1

    adjective Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of stars

  2. 2

    adjective Heavenly

  3. 3

    adjective Exceptional, exceptionally good

    The actress gave a stellar performance

steller

  1. 1

    noun Steller's sea cow, an extinct sirenian

Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.

Which is more common, stellar or steller?

stellar appears 5.8 times per million words; steller about once in every 9 million words.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How many people search stellar vs steller?

“stellar vs steller” is searched about 10 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.

Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.

The words