manévsmanterWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: mané is a noun, manter is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#16,814
“mané” frequency rank
#650
“manter” frequency rank
17464
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature mané manter
Definition pessoa boba, tolo sustentar

Letter map: mané vs manter

Shared letters muted; letters that set mané and manter apart highlighted. Shared run: 3. mané runs 4 letters (CVCV) against manter's 6 (CVCCVC) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

4 ch
mané
6 ch
manter

Role in the sentence - mané and manter

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: mané is anoun and manteraverb. On the page they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 17464, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

mané is recorded at frequency rank #16,814, classified as anoun. manter is at rank #650, tagged as averb, pronounced /mɐ̃.ˈteɾ/.

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 17464, this pair ranks #53,777 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of mané vs manter

Shared letters: amn. Private to "mané": é. Private to "manter": ert.

"mané" · 4 letters · shape CVCV  ·  "manter" · 6 letters · shape CVCCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • manter ← amnter · manetr · mannter · manterr · mantre · mantter · matner · mmanter

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "mané" and "manter" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "mané" is a noun and "manter" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "mané" or "manter" show up more?
"manter" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #650 in our Portuguese list, against #16,814 for "mané". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

After this comparison

Pair "mané" vs "manter" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

  • Full dictionary entry for "mané" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "manter" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #53,777 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "mané" and "manter" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "maa vs mané". 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 #53,777 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