Which to use
“made” and “mate” are a confusable English pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.
- #126
- “made” frequency rank
- #2,743
- “mate” frequency rank
- 2869
- confusion score
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | made | mate |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | A grub or maggot. | A fellow, comrade, colleague, partner or someone with whom something is shared, e.g. shipmate, classmate. |
Where the eye mixes made and mate
Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 3 letters in sequence.
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
A purely visual mix-up. made (/meːd/) and mate (/meɪt/) are said differently, so reading them aloud is the quickest way to catch the wrong one. On the page they stay close: they differ by a single letter - d in “made” becomes t in “mate”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 2869, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.
made is recorded at frequency rank #126, classified as anoun, pronounced /meːd/. mate is at rank #2,743, tagged as anoun, pronounced /meɪt/.
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 2869, this pair ranks #523,793 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.
Orthographic DNA of made vs mate
Shared letters: aem. Private to "made": d. Private to "mate": t.
"made" · 4 letters · shape CVCV · "mate" · 4 letters · shape CVCV