ONU
The verdict
“ONU” is a regularly-used Portuguese word, ranked #3,850 in Portuguese word frequency and used as an abbreviation.
- #3,850
- frequency rank, Portuguese
- 3
- letters
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed May 6, 2026) - sigla para a Organização das Nações Unidas
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 | ONU |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Part of speech | Abbreviation |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #3,850 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “ONU” sits in Portuguese frequency
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The Portuguese entry for ONU is 3 letters long, classified as an abbreviation. Corpus data places it at rank #3,850 in overall Portuguese word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "sigla para a Organização das Nações Unidas".
The misspelling generator found no plausible variants for ONU, a sign its spelling follows regular Portuguese conventions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "os", "ou", "or", and more, a pairing that trips writers up because the two words share enough sound or shape to blur together.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct Portuguese form is ONU, spelled O-N-U.
Definition
- 1sigla para a Organização das Nações Unidas
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you spell "ONU"?
What does "ONU" mean?
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Is PlainSpell free to use?
Using “ONU”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct Portuguese spelling is O-N-U - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Don't mix it up with “os” - see the side-by-side comparison. ONU vs os
- Browse more Portuguese words and confusable pairs in the same reference. Portuguese words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.