sea vs sei, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“sea” is a noun and “sei” is an intj - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#9,925
“sea” frequency rank: #118
“sei” frequency rank: 10043
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	sea	sei
Definition	mar.	expressa que aquilo ouvido que foi dito ou afirmado por alguém não é tomado como sendo a verdade

Letter map: sea vs sei

Shared letters muted; letters that set sea and sei apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

3 ch

sea

3 ch

sei

Part-of-speech tell for sea / sei

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: sea is anoun and seianintj. On the page they differ by a single letter - a in “sea” becomes i in “sei”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 10043, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

sea is recorded at frequency rank #9,925, classified as anoun, pronounced ]. sei is at rank #118, tagged as anintj.

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 10043, this pair ranks #63,188 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - a relatively easy-to-tell-apart pair.

Orthographic DNA of sea vs sei

Shared letters: es. Private to "sea": a. Private to "sei": i.

"sea" · 3 letters · shape CVV · "sei" · 3 letters · shape CVV

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "sea" for "sei" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "sea" is a noun and "sei" an intj, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

In ordinary Portuguese text, does "sea" or "sei" show up more?

"sei" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #118 in our Portuguese list, against #9,925 for "sea". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "sea" and "sei". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "sea" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "sei" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #63,188 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"sea" and "sei" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "sea vs soap". Nearby pair

Confusion rank #63,188 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.