shipvsshutWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: ship is a noun, shut is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“ship” is a noun and “shut” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#23,693
“ship” frequency rank
#41,005
“shut” frequency rank
64698
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature ship shut
Definition Couple principalement non officiel ou non canonique entre des personnages. Refermer, fermer ce qui était ouvert, fermer.

Letter map: ship vs shut

Shared letters muted; letters that set ship and shut apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

4 ch
ship
4 ch
shut

Part-of-speech tell for ship / shut

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: ship is anoun and shutaverb. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 64698, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

ship is recorded at frequency rank #23,693, classified as anoun, pronounced \ʃip\. shut is at rank #41,005, 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 64698, this pair ranks #75,789 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of ship vs shut

Shared letters: hs. Private to "ship": ip. Private to "shut": tu.

"ship" · 4 letters · shape CCVC  ·  "shut" · 4 letters · shape CCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • shiphsip · shhip · shipp · shpi · sihp · sship
  • shuthsut · shhut · shtu · shutt · sshut · suht

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "ship" and "shut" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "ship" is a noun and "shut" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Which is more common, "ship" or "shut"?
"ship" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #23,693 in our French list, against #41,005 for "shut". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "ship" and "shut". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "ship" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "shut" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #75,789 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "ship" and "shut" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "shut vs suu". 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 #75,789 of 440,172 scored French pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list