Use cheap for anything low in price, low in quality, or stingy; use cheep for the sound a chick makes. They sound identical but are unrelated in meaning: a cheap flight costs little, while a cheep is what a chick does in the nest.
The core difference
Cheap describes price, quality or meanness; cheep describes a small bird's sound.
- cheap — costing little, or poor quality: We found a cheap flight to Lisbon for under fifty pounds.
- cheep — the short, high-pitched sound a chick or small bird makes: The chicks cheeped noisily as they waited to be fed.
How to tell them apart
A simple memory trick: cheap has the same vowel sound as cheat, and both can carry a whiff of getting a bad deal — a cheap suit, a cheap shot. Cheep, by contrast, only ever describes noise, so if a word is describing a sound rather than a price or a quality, it is cheep, not cheap.
The mix-up mostly shows up in writing, since the two words are pronounced the same. Someone jotting down notes about a pet shop or a farm might type cheap by habit when they mean the sound the chicks are making, simply because cheap is the far more common word.
