CEO
"ceo" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“CEO” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #3,216) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #3,216
- frequency rank, English
- 5,599
- “C” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of chief executive officer.
Corpus desk
Index EN-ceo · CEO · English
CEO · rank #3,216 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #3,216
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,599
- PHOTO-FINISH cats
Nearest frequency peer: cats (-1 rank slots)
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Frequency neighbours of confusable “CEO”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- breaks
breaks
96,788 corpus weight
- carefully
carefully
96,787 corpus weight
- cats
cats
96,786 corpus weight
- CEO
CEO
96,785 corpus weight
- choices
choices
96,784 corpus weight
- closing
closing
96,783 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “CEO” against nearest ranked English headwords, not a reprint of the confusable-pair desk.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | CEO |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #3,216 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “CEO”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for CEO is neighbouring look-alikes ("co", "CM", …), not just typos; it is anoun. Frequency #3,216 among 5,599 “C” headwords. 5 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
We couldn't generate a plausible misspelling set for CEO, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "co", "CM", "CT", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Our source data has no etymology on file for this entry, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct English form is CEO, spelled C-E-O.
Definition
- 1Initialism of chief executive officer.
- 2Initialism of chief executive officer.
- 3Initialism of civil enforcement officer.
- 4Acronym of current engine option.
- 5Initialism of city engineering office.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how CEO appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
CEOs who once made 50 times the average worker’s salary made more than 500 times as much in 2001.
Stack ranking had come into fashion after GE CEO Jack Welch used a similar system, called rank-and-yank, to turn around that company in the 1980s and 1990s.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 English corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar English words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "CEO", not the corpus desk frequency band.