cafévscanaWhich spelling fits?

Which to use

“café” and “cana” are a confusable Portuguese pair: similar on the page, but distinct in meaning, check the gloss before you choose.

#931
“café” frequency rank
#5,503
“cana” frequency rank
6434
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature café cana
Definition fruto gerado pelo cafeeiro planta rizomatosa de colmo lenhoso

Letter map: café vs cana

Shared letters muted; letters that set café and cana apart highlighted. Shared run: 2. café and cana follow the identical consonant-vowel pattern (CVCV). Same shape at a glance is often the real trap, independent of shared letters.

4 ch
café
4 ch
cana

Spelling & dictionary notes on café vs cana

café and cana are indexed as a confusable Portuguese pair. We have no recorded pronunciation or part of speech for both members, so the spelling overlap is what we can show you: they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 6434, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

café is recorded at frequency rank #931, classified as anoun, pronounced /kɐ.ˈfɛ/. cana is at rank #5,503, 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 6434, this pair ranks #68,003 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of café vs cana

Shared letters: ac. Private to "café": fé. Private to "cana": n.

"café" · 4 letters · shape CVCV  ·  "cana" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • cana ← acna · caan · canna · ccana · cnaa

Frequently Asked Questions

Can "café" and "cana" be used interchangeably?
No. They share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions, but the dictionary glosses above give them different meanings, so swapping one for the other changes what the sentence says.
Frequency check: "café" vs "cana" - which ranks higher?
"café" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #931 in our Portuguese list, against #5,503 for "cana". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "café" and "cana". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "café" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "cana" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #68,003 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "café" and "cana" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "cana vs conca". 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 #68,003 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list