meiovsmenWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: meio is a adjective, men is a pronoun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“meio” is an adjective and “men” is a pronoun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#190
“meio” frequency rank
#6,318
“men” frequency rank
6508
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature meio men
Definition designativo de metade pronome indefinido da terceira pessoa do singular, equivalente à partícula "se"

Letter map: meio vs men

Shared letters muted; letters that set meio and men apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

4 ch
meio
3 ch
men

Part-of-speech tell for meio / men

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: meio is anadjective and menapronoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 6508, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

meio is recorded at frequency rank #190, classified as anadj, pronounced /ˈmɐj.u/. men is at rank #6,318, tagged as apron.

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 6508, this pair ranks #67,913 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of meio vs men

Shared letters: em. Private to "meio": io. Private to "men": n.

"meio" · 4 letters · shape CVVV  ·  "men" · 3 letters · shape CVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • meioemio · meoi · mieo · mmeio

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "meio" and "men" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "meio" is an adjective and "men" a pronoun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "meio" or "men" show up more?
"meio" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #190 in our Portuguese list, against #6,318 for "men". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

You've compared "meio" and "men". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "meio" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "men" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #67,913 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "meio" and "men" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "maa vs men". 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 #67,913 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