só vs spot, What's the Difference?

Which to use

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

#50
“só” frequency rank: #19,856
“spot” frequency rank: 19906
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	só	spot
Definition	solitário, sem companhia, sem círculo social	mancha

Letter map: só vs spot

Shared letters muted; letters that set só and spot apart highlighted. Shared run: 1.

2 ch

só

4 ch

spot

Part-of-speech tell for só / spot

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: só is anadjective and spotanoun. On the page they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 19906, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

só is recorded at frequency rank #50, classified as anadj, pronounced /ˈsɔ/. spot is at rank #19,856, 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 19906, this pair ranks #50,717 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of só vs spot

Shared letters: s. Private to "só": ó. Private to "spot": opt.

"só" · 2 letters · shape CV · "spot" · 4 letters · shape CCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

spot ← psot · sopt · spott · sppot · spto · sspot

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "só" for "spot" ever safe?

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

Which is more common, "só" or "spot"?

"só" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #50 in our Portuguese list, against #19,856 for "spot". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "só" and "spot". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "só" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "spot" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #50,717 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"só" and "spot" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "skol vs spot". 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 #50,717 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.