po
/pəʊ/
"po" is a 2-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“po” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #7,482) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #7,482
- frequency rank, English
- 4,417
- “P” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A peacock.
Corpus desk
Index EN-po · po · English
po · rank #7,482 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-COMMON #7,482
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-1 1 vowel
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 4,417
- PHOTO-FINISH poker
Nearest frequency peer: poker (+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 “po”
Peers at similar corpus weight, separate from look-alike pairs below
- occurring
occurring
92,523 corpus weight
- po
po
92,519 corpus weight
- poker
poker
92,518 corpus weight
- portable
portable
92,517 corpus weight
- priced
priced
92,516 corpus weight
- Quebec
Quebec
92,515 corpus weight
What this shows Bars place “po” 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 | po |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /pəʊ/ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #7,482 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Corpus rank beside confusables of “po”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for po is neighbouring look-alikes ("PP", "PR", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced /pəʊ/. Frequency #7,482 among 4,417 “P” headwords. Gloss: "A peacock.".
po doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "PP", "PR", "pt", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English po (found also in pocock), from Old English pāwa, pēa (“peacock”), from Proto-Germanic *pāwô (“peacock”), from Latin pāvō. Cognate with Dutch pauw, German Pfau. See also peacock. The correct English form is po, spelled P-O.
Definition
- 1A peacock.
Etymology
From Middle English po (found also in pocock), from Old English pāwa, pēa (“peacock”), from Proto-Germanic *pāwô (“peacock”), from Latin pāvō. Cognate with Dutch pauw, German Pfau. See also peacock.
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.