yongvsyouWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: yong is a adjective, you is a pronoun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“yong” is an adjective and “you” is a pronoun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#16,835
“yong” frequency rank
#11
“you” frequency rank
16846
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature yong you
Definition Obsolete spelling of young. The people spoken, or written to, as an object.

Letter map: yong vs you

Shared letters muted; letters that set yong and you apart highlighted. Shared run: 2. yong runs 4 letters (VVCC) against you's 3 (VVV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

4 ch
yong
3 ch
you

Part-of-speech tell for yong / you

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: yong is anadjective and youapronoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 16846, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

yong is recorded at frequency rank #16,835, classified as anadj. you is at rank #11, tagged as apron, pronounced /ju/.

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 16846, this pair ranks #455,229 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of yong vs you

Shared letters: oy. Private to "yong": gn. Private to "you": u.

"yong" · 4 letters · shape VVCC  ·  "you" · 3 letters · shape VVV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • yong ← oyng · ynog · yogn · yongg · yonng · yyong

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "yong" for "you" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "yong" is an adjective and "you" a pronoun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Frequency check: "yong" vs "you" - which ranks higher?
"you" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #11 in our English list, against #16,835 for "yong". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "yong" and "you".

  • Full dictionary entry for "yong" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "you" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #455,229 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "yong" and "you" 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 #455,229 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