tau
/taw/
The verdict
“tau” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #32,397) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #32,397
- frequency rank, Portuguese
- 917
- “T” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - nome da décima nona letra do alfabeto grego (Τ/τ)
Corpus desk
Index PT-tau · tau · Portuguese
tau · rank #32,397 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #32,397
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-MID 917
- PHOTO-FINISH sínodo
Nearest frequency peer: sínodo (-2 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 “tau”
Pares de peso semelhante no corpus, aparte dos confusáveis abaixo
- sucumbir
sucumbir
67,613 corpus weight
- sínodo
sínodo
67,606 corpus weight
- tau
tau
67,604 corpus weight
- tendão
tendão
67,600 corpus weight
- timorense
timorense
67,596 corpus weight
- tino
tino
67,595 corpus weight
What this shows As barras situam “tau” 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 | tau |
| Language | Portuguese |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /taw/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #32,397 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rank de corpus junto a confusáveis de “tau”
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for tau is neighbouring look-alikes ("te", "to", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced /taw/. Frequency #32,397 among 917 “T” headwords. 3 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
Zero misspellings are on record for tau in our index, a straightforward case of a spelling with little room for common typos. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "te", "to", "tu", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so its spelling is easiest explained by how it's pronounced rather than where it came from. The correct Portuguese form is tau, spelled T-A-U.
Definition
- 1nome da décima nona letra do alfabeto grego (Τ/τ)
- 2partícula elementar de carga negativa da terceira geração de léptons, segundo o modelo padrão da física de partículas
- 3última letra do alfabeto hebraico (ת), correspondente ao T latino
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
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Similar Portuguese words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "tau", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked Portuguese headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).