Is there a word for two or more words that look alike?

These words look alike because they are of the same length and vary by a letter. Therefore, they are orthographic neighbours to each other.

Orthographic neighbour—a word that differs from another word of the same length by only one letter.

Example

Given the word "cat", the words "bat", "fat", "mat", "cab", etc. are considered orthographic neighbors.

— Wiktionary

Evidently, these (a) look similar and (b) especially with autocorrect, might be frequently confused for one another.


Sven Yargs informs us that Adrian Room, in The Penguin Dictionary of Confusibles (1979), calls them ... confusibles. His dictionary has useful entries for such similar-sounding terms as affect/effect, censor/censure, eruption/irruption, and Jacobean/Jacobin/Jacobite, but (for reasons unknown to me) it omits coverage of adapt/adept/adopt, eminent/immanent/imminent and prescription/proscription.

From the OED:

Confusable Adj. Capable of being, or liable to be, confused. Also as n. plural (and with spelling -ible), things, esp. words, that may be confused.

1864 in Webster's Amer. Dict. Eng. Lang. ; and in later Dicts. --

1985 Eng. Today Apr. 19/1 Much of this material deals with words or constructions which are often confused, and some even specialise in these ‘confusibles’.