tevstuneTell them apart

Quick tell: te is a pronoun, tune is a noun, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“te” is a pronoun and “tune” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#59
“te” frequency rank
#44,150
“tune” frequency rank
44209
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature te tune
Definition a ti canção, melodia, música

Letter map: te vs tune

Shared letters muted; letters that set te and tune apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

2 ch
te
4 ch
tune

Role in the sentence - te and tune

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: te is apronoun and tuneanoun. On the page they differ by 2 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 44209, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

te is recorded at frequency rank #59, classified as apron, pronounced /tɨ/. tune is at rank #44,150, 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 44209, this pair ranks #21,319 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of te vs tune

Shared letters: et. Private to "te": -. Private to "tune": nu.

"te" · 2 letters · shape CV  ·  "tune" · 4 letters · shape CVCV

Known mistypes of this pair

  • tunetnue · ttune · tuen · tunne · utne

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "te" for "tune" ever safe?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "te" is a pronoun and "tune" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "te" or "tune" show up more?
"te" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #59 in our Portuguese list, against #44,150 for "tune". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

Useful next steps

You've compared "te" and "tune". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "te" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "tune" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #21,319 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "te" and "tune" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "tufo vs tune". 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 #21,319 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