A burro is a small donkey, often used to carry loads or found living wild in the American Southwest. To burrow is to dig a tunnel or hole, and a burrow is also the hole itself. One is an animal you might ride or load up, the other is what a rabbit or fox digs to live in.
The core difference
Burro is a donkey, while burrow is a dug tunnel or the act of digging one.
- burro — a small donkey, especially a pack animal: The hikers spotted a wild burro grazing near the canyon.
- burrow — to dig a tunnel or hole: Rabbits burrow into soft soil to build their warrens.
- burrow — a tunnel dug by an animal as a home: The fox retreated into its burrow at the first sign of danger.
How to tell them apart
A quick way to keep these apart: burrow has an extra w, and that w can stand for a hole in the ground, dug by a creature that wants to hide away. Burro, without the w, is simply the Spanish word for donkey, borrowed directly into English.
The mix-up shows up most in nature writing, where a burro might be grazing near a canyon while a rabbit's burrow sits underfoot nearby, and the two words are easy to type interchangeably by mistake despite meaning something entirely different.
