mourãovsmouroWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: mourão is a adjective, mouro is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“mourão” is an adjective and “mouro” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#15,627
“mourão” frequency rank
#36,124
“mouro” frequency rank
51751
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature mourão mouro
Definition muito morena ou moreno, muito mouro habitante da Mauritânia; muçulmano; sarraceno

Letter map: mourão vs mouro

Shared letters muted; letters that set mourão and mouro apart highlighted. Shared run: 5. mourão runs 6 letters (CVVCVV) against mouro's 5 (CVVCV) - the length gap alone is often enough to separate them once you know to check it.

6 ch
mourão
5 ch
mouro

Part-of-speech tell for mourão / mouro

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: mourão is anadjective and mouroanoun. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 51751, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

mourão is recorded at frequency rank #15,627, classified as anadj, pronounced /mou.'ɾaŋ/. mouro is at rank #36,124, 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 51751, this pair ranks #13,348 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - among the most confusable pairs.

Orthographic DNA of mourão vs mouro

Shared letters: moru. Private to "mourão": ã. Private to "mouro": -.

"mourão" · 6 letters · shape CVVCVV  ·  "mouro" · 5 letters · shape CVVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • mouro ← mmouro · moruo · mouor · mourro · muoro · omuro

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "mourão" for "mouro" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "mourão" is an adjective and "mouro" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "mourão" or "mouro" show up more?
"mourão" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #15,627 in our Portuguese list, against #36,124 for "mouro". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "mourão" and "mouro". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "mourão" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "mouro" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #13,348 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "mourão" and "mouro" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "mouro vs muso". 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 #13,348 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