doorvsdownWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: door is a noun, down is an adverb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“door” is a noun and “down” is an adverb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#32,179
“door” frequency rank
#8,793
“down” frequency rank
40972
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature door down
Definition Puerta. Hacia abajo.

Where the eye mixes door and down

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.

4 ch
door
4 ch
down

Why the eye confuses door with down

These two trip readers on the page rather than in the ear: door is /dɔː/ while down is /daʊn/. Spoken aloud the problem disappears. In writing it persists, because they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions, and the parts of speech differ too (noun vs adverb), which is usually the fastest check. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 40972, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

door is recorded at frequency rank #32,179, classified as anoun, pronounced /dɔː/. down is at rank #8,793, tagged as anadv, pronounced /daʊn/.

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 40972, this pair ranks #156,203 of 323,831 scored Spanish confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of door vs down

Shared letters: do. Private to "door": r. Private to "down": nw.

"door" · 4 letters · shape CVVC  ·  "down" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • doorddoor · doorr · dor · doro · odor
  • downddown · donw · downn · dowwn · dwon · odwn

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "door" and "down" be used interchangeably?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "door" is a noun and "down" an adverb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Spanish text, does "door" or "down" show up more?
"down" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #8,793 in our Spanish list, against #32,179 for "door". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Eye-level mix-up between "door" and "down" is sorted above. Next: full entries or other pairs that share a letter shape.

  • Full dictionary entry for "door" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "down" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #156,203 of 323,831 scored Spanish confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "door" and "down" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "dont vs door". 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 #156,203 of 323,831 scored Spanish pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list