evilvspaterWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: evil is a adjective, pater is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“evil” is an adjective and “pater” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#15,620
“evil” frequency rank
#8,439
“pater” frequency rank
24059
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature evil pater
Definition böse der Vater

Letter map: evil vs pater

Shared letters muted; letters that set evil and pater apart highlighted. Shared run: 1. evil runs 4 letters (VCVC) against pater's 5 (CVCVC) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

4 ch
evil
5 ch
pater

Part-of-speech tell for evil / pater

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: evil is anadjective and pateranoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 24059, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

evil is recorded at frequency rank #15,620, classified as anadj, pronounced […]. pater is at rank #8,439, tagged as anoun, pronounced […].

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 24059, this pair ranks #1,852,896 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of evil vs pater

Shared letters: e. Private to "evil": ilv. Private to "pater": aprt.

"evil" · 4 letters · shape VCVC  ·  "pater" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • evileivl · evill · evli · evvil
  • paterapter · paetr · paterr · patre · patter · ppater · ptaer

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "evil" for "pater" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "evil" is an adjective and "pater" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary German text, does "evil" or "pater" show up more?
"pater" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #8,439 in our German list, against #15,620 for "evil". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

What to do next

Pair "evil" vs "pater" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

  • Full dictionary entry for "evil" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "pater" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #1,852,896 of 2,006,359 scored German confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "evil" and "pater" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "evil vs puzzles". 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 #1,852,896 of 2,006,359 scored German pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

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

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list