ao
[ɔ]
The verdict
“ao” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #21,556) as a contraction. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #21,556
- frequency rank, Spanish
- 7,704
- “A” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Contracción de la preposición a ("a") y el artículo o ("el"): (al).
Corpus desk
Index ES-ao · ao · Spanish
ao · rank #21,556 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #21,556
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 7,704
- PHOTO-FINISH ancla
Nearest frequency peer: ancla (-1 rank slots)
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.
Vecinos de frecuencia del confusable “ao”
Pares de peso similar en el corpus, aparte de los confusables abajo
- alejan
alejan
78,448 corpus weight
- altiplano
altiplano
78,447 corpus weight
- ancla
ancla
78,446 corpus weight
- ao
ao
78,445 corpus weight
- armenios
armenios
78,443 corpus weight
- Aros
Aros
78,442 corpus weight
What this shows Las barras sitúan “ao” frente a los lemas españoles más cercanos por rango, no un reprint del escritorio de confusables.
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 | ao |
| Language | Spanish |
| Part of speech | Contraction |
| IPA | [ɔ] |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #21,556 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rango de corpus junto a confusables de “ao”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for ao is neighbouring look-alikes ("ay", "as", …), not just typos; it is acontraction pronounced [ɔ]. Frequency #21,556 among 7,704 “A” headwords. Gloss: "Contracción de la preposición a ("a") y el artículo o ("el"): (al).".
Zero misspellings are on record for ao in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable Spanish patterns. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "ay", "as", "at", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, leaving phoneme-to-grapheme mapping as the best guide to its spelling rather than a borrowing history. The correct Spanish form is ao, spelled A-O.
Definition
- 1Contracción de la preposición a ("a") y el artículo o ("el"): (al).
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how ao appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Mentras o rei xanta, lle baile unha gallegada ao son da gaita.
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 Spanish corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.