cafévscofreWhat's the difference?

Which to use

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

#931
“café” frequency rank
#13,689
“cofre” frequency rank
14620
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature café cofre
Definition fruto gerado pelo cafeeiro local onde se guardam dinheiro e objetos de valor

Where the eye mixes café and cofre

Muted = shared; highlighted = the visual trap. They share 2 letters in sequence.

4 ch
café
5 ch
cofre

Look-alike desk: café vs cofre

A purely visual mix-up. café (/kɐ.ˈfɛ/) and cofre (/ˈkɔ.fɾɨ/) are said differently, so reading them aloud is the quickest way to catch the wrong one. On the page they stay close: they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 14620, 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/. cofre is at rank #13,689, tagged as anoun, pronounced /ˈkɔ.fɾɨ/.

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 14620, this pair ranks #57,406 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of café vs cofre

Shared letters: cf. Private to "café": . Private to "cofre": eor.

"café" · 4 letters · shape CVCV  ·  "cofre" · 5 letters · shape CVCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • cofreccofre · cfore · cofer · coffre · cofrre · corfe · ocfre

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "café" for "cofre" ever safe?
No. They are said differently (/kɐ.ˈfɛ/ versus /ˈkɔ.fɾɨ/) and carry different meanings; reading the sentence aloud is usually enough to catch the wrong one.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "café" or "cofre" show up more?
"café" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #931 in our Portuguese list, against #13,689 for "cofre". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

Visual near-miss handled. Browse the word pages or a neighbour when the next look-alike shows up.

  • Full dictionary entry for "café" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "cofre" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #57,406 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "café" and "cofre" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "cofre vs contre". 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 #57,406 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