Which to use
“ying” is a noun and “yong” is an adjective - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.
- #20,273
- “ying” frequency rank
- #16,835
- “yong” frequency rank
- 37108
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | ying | yong |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Alternative form of ching (“knife”). | Obsolete spelling of young. |
Letter map: ying vs yong
Shared letters muted; letters that set ying and yong apart highlighted. Shared run: 3. ying and yong follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (VVCC). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.
Part-of-speech tell for ying / yong
Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: ying is anoun and yonganadjective. On the page they differ by a single letter - i in “ying” becomes o in “yong”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 37108, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
ying is recorded at frequency rank #20,273, classified as anoun, pronounced /ˈjɪŋ/. yong is at rank #16,835, tagged as anadj.
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 37108, this pair ranks #297,344 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.
Orthographic DNA of ying vs yong
Shared letters: gny. Private to "ying": i. Private to "yong": o.
"ying" · 4 letters · shape VVCC · "yong" · 4 letters · shape VVCC
Known mistypes of this pair
Frequently Asked Questions
Do "ying" and "yong" mean the same thing in a sentence?
In ordinary English text, does "ying" or "yong" show up more?
What to do next
You've compared "ying" and "yong". Here's where to go from here.
- Full dictionary entry for "ying" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
- Full dictionary entry for "yong" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
- This pair ranks #297,344 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
- "ying" and "yong" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "yong vs Youngs". 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 #297,344 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.