winningvswringingTell them apart

Which to use

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

#1,132
“winning” frequency rank
#41,957
“wringing” frequency rank
43089
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature winning wringing
Definition present participle and gerund of win present participle and gerund of wring

Letter map: winning vs wringing

Shared letters muted; letters that set winning and wringing apart highlighted. Shared run: 6. winning runs 7 letters (CVCCVCC) against wringing's 8 (CCVCCVCC) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

7 ch
winning
8 ch
wringing

Pair insight - winning / wringing

winning and wringing 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 43089, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

winning is recorded at frequency rank #1,132, classified as averb, pronounced /ˈwɪnɪŋ/. wringing is at rank #41,957, 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 43089, this pair ranks #243,331 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of winning vs wringing

Shared letters: ginw. Private to "winning": -. Private to "wringing": r.

"winning" · 7 letters · shape CVCCVCC  ·  "wringing" · 8 letters · shape CCVCCVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • winning ← iwnning · wining · wininng · winnign · winningg · winninng · winnnig · wnining
  • wringing ← rwinging · wirnging · wrigning · wringging · wringign · wringingg · wringinng · wringnig

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "winning" for "wringing" 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, "winning" or "wringing"?
"winning" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #1,132 in our English list, against #41,957 for "wringing". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "winning" and "wringing". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "winning" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "wringing" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #243,331 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "winning" and "wringing" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "winging vs wringing". 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 #243,331 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