townvsturnWhich spelling fits?

Quick tell: town is a noun, turn is a verb, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“town” is a noun and “turn” is a verb - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#11,172
“town” frequency rank
#14,985
“turn” frequency rank
26157
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature town turn
Definition cidade de pequeno porte embrulhar

Letter map: town vs turn

Shared letters muted; letters that set town and turn apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

4 ch
town
4 ch
turn

Part-of-speech tell for town / turn

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: town is anoun and turnaverb. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 26157, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

town is recorded at frequency rank #11,172, classified as anoun, pronounced /taʊn/])]]. turn is at rank #14,985, tagged as averb.

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 26157, this pair ranks #43,032 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of town vs turn

Shared letters: nt. Private to "town": ow. Private to "turn": ru.

"town" · 4 letters · shape CVCC  ·  "turn" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

  • townotwn · tonw · townn · towwn · ttown · twon
  • turntrun · tturn · tunr · turnn · turrn · utrn

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "town" and "turn" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "town" is a noun and "turn" a verb, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary Portuguese text, does "town" or "turn" show up more?
"town" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #11,172 in our Portuguese list, against #14,985 for "turn". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

Pair "town" vs "turn" is on the table, pick a follow-up below.

  • Full dictionary entry for "town" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "turn" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #43,032 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "town" and "turn" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "tufo vs turn". 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 #43,032 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