caber vs cabo, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“caber” is a verb and “cabo” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#17,454
“caber” frequency rank: #1,092
“cabo” frequency rank: 18546
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	caber	cabo
Definition	poder ser contido em	patente militar abaixo do sargento e acima do soldado

Letter map: caber vs cabo

Shared letters muted; letters that set caber and cabo apart highlighted. Shared run: 3.

5 ch

caber

4 ch

cabo

Part-of-speech tell for caber / cabo

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: caber is averb and caboanoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 18546, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

caber is recorded at frequency rank #17,454, classified as averb, pronounced /kɐ.ˈbeɾ/. cabo is at rank #1,092, tagged as anoun.

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 18546, this pair ranks #52,416 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of caber vs cabo

Shared letters: abc. Private to "caber": er. Private to "cabo": o.

"caber" · 5 letters · shape CVCVC · "cabo" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

caber ← acber · cabber · caberr · cabre · caebr · cbaer · ccaber
cabo ← acbo · cabbo · caob · cbao · ccabo

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "caber" and "cabo" mean the same thing in a sentence?

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

In ordinary Portuguese text, does "caber" or "cabo" show up more?

"cabo" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #1,092 in our Portuguese list, against #17,454 for "caber". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

Pair "caber" vs "cabo" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

Full dictionary entry for "caber" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "cabo" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #52,416 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"caber" and "cabo" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "caber vs camel". 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 #52,416 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.