womanvswovenConfusable pair

Quick tell: woman is a noun, woven is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“woman” is a noun and “woven” is an adjective - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#452
“woman” frequency rank
#13,844
“woven” frequency rank
14296
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature woman woven
Definition An adult female human. Fabricated by weaving.

Where the eye mixes woman and woven

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence. woman and woven follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (CVCVC). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.

5 ch
woman
5 ch
woven

Visual trap between woman and woven

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: woman is /ˈwʊm.ən/ while woven is /ˈwəʊ.vən/. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions, and the parts of speech differ too (noun vs adjective), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 14296, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

woman is recorded at frequency rank #452, classified as anoun, pronounced /ˈwʊm.ən/. woven is at rank #13,844, tagged as anadj, pronounced /ˈwəʊ.vən/.

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 14296, this pair ranks #470,891 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of woman vs woven

Shared letters: now. Private to "woman": am. Private to "woven": ev.

"woman" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC  ·  "woven" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • woman ← owman · wmoan · woamn · womann · womman · womna · wwoman
  • woven ← owven · woevn · wovenn · wovne · wovven · wvoen · wwoven

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "woman" and "woven" be used interchangeably?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "woman" is a noun and "woven" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Frequency check: "woman" vs "woven" - which ranks higher?
"woman" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #452 in our English list, against #13,844 for "woven". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

Visual near-miss handled. Browse the word pages or a neighbour when the next look-alike shows up.

  • Full dictionary entry for "woman" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "woven" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #470,891 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "woman" and "woven" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "wove vs woven". 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 #470,891 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