alla vs ally, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“alla” is a contraction and “ally” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#36,313
“alla” frequency rank: #15,249
“ally” frequency rank: 51562
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	alla	ally
Definition	na	aliado:

Letter map: alla vs ally

Shared letters muted; letters that set alla and ally apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

4 ch

alla

4 ch

ally

Part-of-speech tell for alla / ally

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: alla is acontraction and allyanoun. On the page they differ by a single letter - a in “alla” becomes y in “ally”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 51562, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

alla is recorded at frequency rank #36,313, classified as acontraction. ally is at rank #15,249, tagged as anoun, pronounced /ˈæ.laɪ/.

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 51562, this pair ranks #13,496 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of alla vs ally

Shared letters: al. Private to "alla": -. Private to "ally": y.

"alla" · 4 letters · shape VCCV · "ally" · 4 letters · shape VCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

alla ← alal · lala
ally ← allyy · aly · alyl · laly

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "alla" for "ally" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "alla" is a contraction and "ally" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

Frequency check: "alla" vs "ally" - which ranks higher?

"ally" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #15,249 in our Portuguese list, against #36,313 for "alla". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

You've compared "alla" and "ally". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "alla" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "ally" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #13,496 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"alla" and "ally" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "alla vs alles". 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 #13,496 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.