widervswindedWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: wider is a adjective, winded is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“wider” is an adjective and “winded” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#4,813
“wider” frequency rank
#34,351
“winded” frequency rank
39164
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature wider winded
Definition comparative form of wide: more wide simple past and past participle of wind

Letter map: wider vs winded

Shared letters muted; letters that set wider and winded apart highlighted. Shared run: 4.

5 ch
wider
6 ch
winded

Part-of-speech tell for wider / winded

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: wider is anadjective and windedaverb. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 39164, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

wider is recorded at frequency rank #4,813, classified as anadj, pronounced /ˈwaɪdɚ/. winded is at rank #34,351, tagged as averb.

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 39164, this pair ranks #279,249 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of wider vs winded

Shared letters: deiw. Private to "wider": r. Private to "winded": n.

"wider" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC  ·  "winded" · 6 letters · shape CVCCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • wideriwder · wdier · widder · widerr · widre · wiedr · wwider
  • windediwnded · widned · windde · windded · windedd · winedd · winnded · wnided

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "wider" for "winded" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "wider" is an adjective and "winded" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary English text, does "wider" or "winded" show up more?
"wider" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #4,813 in our English list, against #34,351 for "winded". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "wider" and "winded".

  • Full dictionary entry for "wider" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "winded" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #279,249 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "wider" and "winded" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "whined vs winded". 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 #279,249 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