ao
/aw/
The verdict
“ao” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #27) as a contraction. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #27
- frequency rank, Portuguese
- 1,900
- “A” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - contração da preposição a com o artigo definido o
Corpus desk
Index PT-ao · ao · Portuguese
ao · rank #27 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-CORE #27
- LEN-SHORT 2 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 1,900
- PHOTO-FINISH foi
Nearest frequency peer: foi (-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.
Vizinhos de frequência do confusável “ao”
Pares de peso semelhante no corpus, aparte dos confusáveis abaixo
- dos
dos
99,977 corpus weight
- mas
mas
99,976 corpus weight
- foi
foi
99,975 corpus weight
- ao
ao
99,974 corpus weight
- me
me
99,973 corpus weight
- você
você
99,972 corpus weight
What this shows As barras situam “ao” face aos lemas portugueses mais próximos por rank, não um reprint da secretária de confusáveis.
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 | Portuguese |
| Part of speech | Contraction |
| IPA | /aw/ |
| Letters | 2 |
| Frequency rank | #27 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rank de corpus junto a confusáveis de “ao”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for ao is neighbouring look-alikes ("As", "ar", …), not just typos; it is acontraction pronounced /aw/. Frequency #27 among 1,900 “A” headwords. 2 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
ao has no tracked misspelling variants, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "As", "ar", "at", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct Portuguese form is ao, spelled A-O.
Definition
- 1contração da preposição a com o artigo definido o
- 2contração da preposição a com o pronome demonstrativo o
This word in other languages
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 Portuguese corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.