alter vs antes, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“alter” is a pronoun and “antes” is an adverb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#23,189
“alter” frequency rank: #151
“antes” frequency rank: 23340
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	alter	antes
Definition	outro (dentre dois)	em tempo anterior

Letter map: alter vs antes

Shared letters muted; letters that set alter and antes apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

5 ch

alter

5 ch

antes

Part-of-speech tell for alter / antes

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: alter is apronoun and antesanadverb. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 23340, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

alter is recorded at frequency rank #23,189, classified as apron. antes is at rank #151, tagged as anadv, pronounced /ˈɐ̃.tɨʃ/.

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 23340, this pair ranks #46,499 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of alter vs antes

Shared letters: aet. Private to "alter": lr. Private to "antes": ns.

"alter" · 5 letters · shape VCCVC · "antes" · 5 letters · shape VCCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

alter ← aletr · allter · alterr · altre · altter · atler
antes ← anets · anntes · antess · antse · anttes · atnes · nates

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "alter" and "antes" be used interchangeably?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "alter" is a pronoun and "antes" an adverb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

In ordinary Portuguese text, does "alter" or "antes" show up more?

"antes" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #151 in our Portuguese list, against #23,189 for "alter". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "alter" and "antes". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "alter" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "antes" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #46,499 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"alter" and "antes" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "alles vs alter". 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 #46,499 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.