IMO
"imo" is a 3-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“IMO” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #11,045) as a proper noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #11,045
- frequency rank, English
- 2,140
- “I” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Initialism of International Maritime Organization.
Corpus desk
Index EN-imo · IMO · English
IMO · rank #11,045 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #11,045
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 2,140
- PHOTO-FINISH illustrate
Nearest frequency peer: illustrate (-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 “IMO”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- hopeless
hopeless
88,959 corpus weight
- hourly
hourly
88,958 corpus weight
- illustrate
illustrate
88,957 corpus weight
- IMO
IMO
88,956 corpus weight
- impressions
impressions
88,955 corpus weight
- indirectly
indirectly
88,954 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “IMO” 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 | IMO |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Proper noun |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #11,045 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “IMO”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for IMO is neighbouring look-alikes ("in", "is", …), not just typos; it is aproper noun. Frequency #11,045 among 2,140 “I” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No misspelling variants are generated for IMO in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "in", "is", "it", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is IMO, spelled I-M-O.
Definition
- 1Initialism of International Maritime Organization.
- 2Initialism of International Mathematical Olympiad.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how IMO appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Sri Lanka has asked the IMO to classify plastic pellets as toxic substances, and Vanuatu is calling for better reporting of containers lost at sea.
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 "IMO", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked English headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).