NP
"np" is a 2-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“NP” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #13,570) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #13,570
- frequency rank, English
- 1,534
- “N” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of notary public.
Corpus desk
Index EN-np · NP · English
NP · rank #13,570 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #13,570
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-0 0 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,534
- PHOTO-FINISH nominate
Nearest frequency peer: nominate (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “NP”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- mummy
mummy
86,434 corpus weight
- Neville
Neville
86,433 corpus weight
- nominate
nominate
86,432 corpus weight
- NP
NP
86,431 corpus weight
- offend
offend
86,430 corpus weight
- oo
oo
86,429 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “NP” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | NP |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #13,570 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “NP”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for NP is neighbouring look-alikes ("NZ", "NT", …), not just typos; it is anoun. Frequency #13,570 among 1,534 “N” headwords. 7 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
Zero misspellings are on record for NP in our index, since its letter sequence doesn't invite the usual edit-distance slips. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "NZ", "NT", "nu", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is NP, spelled N-P.
Definition
- 1Initialism of notary public.
- 2Initialism of nurse practitioner.
- 3Initialism of national park.
- 4Initialism of noun phrase.
- 5Initialism of nanoparticle.
- 6Abbreviation of nondeterministic polynomial, the complexity class of computational problems that a nondeterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time.
- 7Abbreviation of nosocomial pneumonia.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how NP appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Another class, P, is a subset of NP, and includes all decision problems that can be solved by a (deterministic) Turing machine in polynomial time.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.