apovsatosWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: apo is a conjunction, atos is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“apo” is a conjunction and “atos” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#38,142
“apo” frequency rank
#47,734
“atos” frequency rank
85876
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature apo atos
Definition Ou, ou bien. Limite, borne.

Letter map: apo vs atos

Shared letters muted; letters that set apo and atos apart highlighted. Shared run: 2. apo runs 3 letters (VCV) against atos's 4 (VCVC) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

3 ch
apo
4 ch
atos

Part-of-speech tell for apo / atos

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: apo is aconjunction and atosanoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 85876, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

apo is recorded at frequency rank #38,142, classified as aconj, pronounced \ˈa.pɔ\. atos is at rank #47,734, tagged as anoun.

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 85876, this pair ranks #10,611 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of apo vs atos

Shared letters: ao. Private to "apo": p. Private to "atos": st.

"apo" · 3 letters · shape VCV  ·  "atos" · 4 letters · shape VCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • atos ← aots · atoss · atso · attos · taos

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "apo" for "atos" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "apo" is a conjunction and "atos" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
Frequency check: "apo" vs "atos" - which ranks higher?
"apo" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #38,142 in our French list, against #47,734 for "atos". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "apo" and "atos". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "apo" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "atos" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #10,611 of 440,172 scored French confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "apo" and "atos" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "atos vs aves". 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 #10,611 of 440,172 scored French pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

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

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list