persvspetraWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: pers is a pronoun, petra is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“pers” is a pronoun and “petra” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#36,278
“pers” frequency rank
#20,457
“petra” frequency rank
56735
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature pers petra
Definition That which belongs to per, theirs (singular): possessive case of per, used in place of a noun. stone, a weight equal to 14 pounds.

Letter map: pers vs petra

Shared letters muted; letters that set pers and petra apart highlighted. Shared run: 3. pers runs 4 letters (CVCC) against petra's 5 (CVCCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

4 ch
pers
5 ch
petra

Role in the sentence - pers and petra

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: pers is apronoun and petraanoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 56735, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

pers is recorded at frequency rank #36,278, classified as apron. petra is at rank #20,457, tagged as anoun.

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 56735, this pair ranks #124,099 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of pers vs petra

Shared letters: epr. Private to "pers": s. Private to "petra": at.

"pers" · 4 letters · shape CVCC  ·  "petra" · 5 letters · shape CVCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • pers ← eprs · perrs · pesr · ppers
  • petra ← eptra · perta · petar · petrra · pettra · ppetra · ptera

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "pers" for "petra" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "pers" is a pronoun and "petra" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary English text, does "pers" or "petra" show up more?
"petra" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #20,457 in our English list, against #36,278 for "pers". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "pers" and "petra".

  • Full dictionary entry for "pers" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "petra" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #124,099 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "pers" and "petra" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "pecs vs pers". 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 #124,099 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