tenvsthinTell them apart

Quick tell: ten is a pronoun, thin is an adjective, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

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

#10,094
“ten” frequency rank
#34,948
“thin” frequency rank
45042
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature ten thin
Definition este, esta, esse, essa delgado

Letter map: ten vs thin

Shared letters muted; letters that set ten and thin apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

3 ch
ten
4 ch
thin

Part-of-speech tell for ten / thin

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: ten is apronoun and thinanadjective. On the page they differ by 1 letter(s) in length. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 45042, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

ten is recorded at frequency rank #10,094, classified as apron. thin is at rank #34,948, tagged as anadj, pronounced /'θɪn/.

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 45042, this pair ranks #20,389 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of ten vs thin

Shared letters: nt. Private to "ten": e. Private to "thin": hi.

"ten" · 3 letters · shape CVC  ·  "thin" · 4 letters · shape CCVC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • thinhtin · thhin · thinn · thni · tihn · tthin

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "ten" and "thin" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "ten" is a pronoun and "thin" an adjective, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "ten" or "thin" show up more?
"ten" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #10,094 in our Portuguese list, against #34,948 for "thin". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

After this comparison

Done with this confusable. These links stay specific to "ten" and "thin".

  • Full dictionary entry for "ten" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "thin" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #20,389 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "ten" and "thin" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "thin vs til". 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 #20,389 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