doorvsdurConfusable pair

Quick tell: door is a noun, dur is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#869
“door” frequency rank
#39,793
“dur” frequency rank
40662
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature door dur
Definition A portal of entry into a building, room, or vehicle, typically consisting of a rigid plane movable on a hinge. It may have a handle to help open and close, a latch to hold it closed, and a lock that ensures it cannot be opened without a key. Major; in the major mode.

Where the eye mixes door and dur

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.

4 ch
door
3 ch
dur

Why the eye confuses door with dur

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: door is /do(ː)ɹ/ while dur is /duːɹ/. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they differ by 1 letter(s) in length, and the parts of speech differ too (noun vs adjective), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 40662, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

door is recorded at frequency rank #869, classified as anoun, pronounced /do(ː)ɹ/. dur is at rank #39,793, tagged as anadj, pronounced /duːɹ/.

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 40662, this pair ranks #265,480 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of door vs dur

Shared letters: dr. Private to "door": o. Private to "dur": u.

"door" · 4 letters · shape CVVC  ·  "dur" · 3 letters · shape CVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • doorddoor · doorr · doro

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "door" and "dur" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "door" is a noun and "dur" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary English text, does "door" or "dur" show up more?
"door" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #869 in our English list, against #39,793 for "dur". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

Pronunciation already separates them, if the page still looks alike, the dictionary links below settle it.

  • Full dictionary entry for "door" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "dur" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #265,480 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "door" and "dur" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "dox vs dur". 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 #265,480 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