Portuguese orthography

Portuguese orthography[] is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.
The spelling of Portuguese is largely phonemic, but some phonemes can be spelled in more than one way. In ambiguous cases, the correct spelling is determined through a combination of etymology with morphology and tradition; so there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters or digraphs. Knowing the main inflectional paradigms of Portuguese and being acquainted with the orthography of other Western European languages can be helpful.
A full list of sounds, diphthongs, and their main spellings is given at Portuguese phonology. This article addresses the less trivial details of the spelling of Portuguese as well as other issues of orthography, such as accentuation.

Letter names and pronunciations

Only the most frequent sounds appear below since a listing of all cases and exceptions would become cumbersome. Portuguese is a pluricentric language, and pronunciation of some of the letters differs. Apart from those variations, the pronunciation of most consonants is fairly straightforward.
Although many letters have more than one pronunciation, their phonetic value is often predictable from their position within a word; that is normally the case for the consonants. Since only five letters are available to write the fourteen vowel sounds of Portuguese, vowels have a more complex orthography, but even then, pronunciation is somewhat predictable. Knowing the main inflectional paradigms of Portuguese can help.
In the following table and in the remainder of this article, the phrase "at the end of a syllable" can be understood as "before a consonant, or at the end of a word". For the letter r, "at the start of a syllable " means "at the beginning of a word or after l, n, s, or a prefix ending in a consonant". For letters with more than one common pronunciation, their most common phonetic values are given on the left side of the semicolon; sounds after it occur only in a limited number of positions within a word. Sounds separated by "~" are allophones or dialectal variants.
The names of the letters are masculine.

Digraphs

Portuguese uses digraphs, pairs of letters which represent a single sound different from the sum of their components. Digraphs are not included in the alphabet.
The digraphs and, before and, may represent both plain or labialised sounds, but they are always labialised before and . The trema used to be employed to explicitly indicate labialized sounds before and, but since its elimination, such words have to be memorised. Pronunciation divergences mean some of these words may be spelled differently. The digraph is pronounced as an English by the overwhelming majority of speakers. The digraphs and, of Occitan origin, denote palatal consonants that do not exist in English. The digraphs and are used only between vowels. The pronunciation of the digraph varies with dialect

Diacritics

Portuguese makes use of five diacritics: the cedilla, acute accent, circumflex accent, tilde, and grave accent . Its major use was on adverbial formations: Só->Sòmente, Última->Ùltimamente. Formerly the diaeresis was also used.
The cedilla indicates that ç is pronounced . By convention, s is written instead of etymological ç at the beginning of words, as in "São", the hypocoristic form of the female name "Conceição".
The acute accent and the circumflex accent indicate that a vowel is stressed and the quality of the accented vowel and, more precisely, its height: á, é, and ó are low vowels ; â, ê, and ô are high vowels. They also distinguish a few homographs: por "by" with pôr "to put", pode " can" with pôde " could".
The tilde marks nasal vowels before glides such as in cãibra and nação, at the end of words, before final -s, and in some compounds: romãzeira "pomegranate tree", from romã "pomegranate", and vãmente "vainly", from vã "vain". It usually coincides with the stressed vowel unless there is an acute or circumflex accent elsewhere in the word or if the word is compound: órgão "organ", irmã + -zinha = irmãzinha "little sister". The form õ is used only in the plurals of nouns ending in -ão and in the second person singular and third person forms of the verb pôr in the present tense.

The graphemes â, ê, ô and é typically represent oral vowels, but before m or n followed by another consonant, the vowels represented are nasal. Elsewhere, nasal vowels are indicated with a tilde.

The grave accent marks the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words, normally the preposition a and an article or a demonstrative pronoun: a + aquela = àquela "at that", a + a = à "at the". It can also be used when indicating time: "às 4 horas" = "at 4 o'clock". It does not indicate stress.

Sometimes à and ò are used in other contraction forms, e.g.: cò and cà. and coa/ca. Other examples of its use are: prà, pràs and prò, pròs. According to the orthographic rules of 1990, these forms should be spelled without the grave accent.
Until the spelling reforms of 1971 and 1973, the grave accent was also used to denote accents in words with so-called irregular stress after some changes. namely adverbs formed with the -mente affix and nouns with affixes that start with z'' like -zinho or -zão, as well as in some other cases of indication of slightly accented or yet unaccented vowels, all of the vowels can take the grave accent mark, e.g.: provà'velmente, cafèzinho, analìticamente, lògicamente, ùnicamente. The main pattern is to change the acute accent mark, if it graphically exists in any part of the word before the affixation to the grave one, e.g.: in penultimate syllable: notá'vel › notàvelmente; in ultimate syllable: jacaré › jacarèzão, and so on. The circumflex accent mark did not change: simultâneo/a › simultâneamente.
From 1911 to 1945, exclusively in Portugal and its colonies, the grave accent was also used to distinguish a pair of words that had different pronunciations in their unstressed vowels, like pregar and prègar, or molhado and mòlhado. Although even in its time, this use was rare and restricted to è'' and ò only. Some grammatists still denote unstressed and as è and ò respectively, but this accentuation is not provided by the current orthographical standards.

The diaeresis is nowadays practically in disuse. Until 2009 they were still used in Brazilian Portuguese in the combinations güe/qüe and güi/qüi. In old orthography they were also used as in English, French and Dutch to separate diphthongs. The other way to separate diphthongs and non-hiatic vowel combinations is to use acute or circumflex.

Stress

Below are the general rules for the use of the acute accent and the circumflex in Portuguese. Primary stress may fall on any of the three final syllables of a word. A word is called oxytone if it is stressed on its last syllable, paroxytone if stress falls on the syllable before the last, and proparoxytone if stress falls on the third syllable from the end. Most multisyllabic words are stressed on the penult.
All words stressed on the antepenult take an accent mark. Words with two or more syllables, stressed on their last syllable, are not accented if they have any ending other than -a, -e, -o, -am, -em, -ens; except to indicate hiatus as in açaí. With these endings paroxytonic words must then be accented to differentiate them from oxytonic words, as in amável, lápis, órgão.

Monosyllables

Monosyllables are typically not accented, but those whose last vowel is a, e, or o, possibly followed by final -s, -m or -ns, may require an accent mark.

The verb pôr is accented to distinguish it from the preposition por.
Third-person plural forms of the verbs ter and vir, têm and vêm are accented to be distinguished from third-person singulars of the same verbs, tem, vem. Other monosyllables ending in -em are not accented.
Monosyllables ending in -o with the vowel pronounced or in -e with the vowel pronounced or are not accented. Otherwise, they are accented.
Monosyllables containing only the vowel a take an acute accent except for the contractions of the preposition a with the article a, which take the grave accent, à, and for the following clitic articles, pronouns, prepositions, or contractions, which are not accented : a, da, la, lha, ma, na, ta. Most of those words have a masculine equivalent ending in -o, also not accented: o, do, lo, lho, mo, no, to.

Polysyllables

The endings -a, -e, -o, -am, -em, -ens are unstressed. The stressed vowel of words with such endings is assumed to be the first one before the ending itself: bonita, bonitas, gente, viveram, seria, serias, seriam. If the word happens to be stressed elsewhere, it requires an accent mark: será, serás, até, séria, sérias, Inácio, Amazônia/''Amazónia. The endings -em and -ens take the acute accent when stressed, except in third-person plural forms of verbs derived from ter and vir, which take the circumflex. Words with other endings are regarded as oxytone by default: viver, jardim, vivi, bambu, pensais, pensei, pensou, pensão. They require an accent when they are stressed on a syllable other than their last: táxi, fácil, amáveis, râguebi.
Rising diphthongs containing stressed i or stressed u are accented so they will not be pronounced as falling diphthongs. Exceptions are those whose stressed vowel forms a syllable with a letter other than s. Thus, raí'zes, incluído, saía and saíste are accented, but raiz, sairmos and saiu''' are not.
The stressed diphthongs ei, eu, oi take an acute accent on the first vowel whenever it is low.
Aside from those cases, there are a few more words that take an accent, usually to disambiguate frequent homographs such as pode and pôde. In European Portuguese, a distinction is made in the first person plural of verbs in -ar, between the present tense ending -amos and the preterite -ámos. As these are pronounced identically in Brazilian Portuguese, this accent is not used.

Accentuation rules of Portuguese are somewhat different regarding syllabification than those of Spanish.

Personal names

The use of diacritics in personal names is generally restricted to the combinations above, often also by the applicable Portuguese spelling rules.
Portugal is more restrictive than Brazil in regard to given names. They must be Portuguese or adapted to the Portuguese orthography and sound and should also be easily discerned as either a masculine or feminine name by a Portuguese speaker. There are lists of previously accepted and refused names, and names that are both unusual and not included in the list of previously accepted names must be subject to consultation of the national director of registries. The list of previously accepted names includes some of the most common names, like "Pedro" and "Ana".
Brazilian birth registrars, on the other hand, are likely to accept names containing any letters or diacritics and are limited only to the availability of such characters in their typesetting facility.

Consonants with more than one spelling

Most consonants have the same values as in the International Phonetic Alphabet, except for the palatals and, which are spelled and, respectively, and the following velars, rhotics, and sibilants:

Rhotics

The alveolar flap is always spelled as a single. The other rhotic phoneme of Portuguese, which may be pronounced as a trill or as one of the fricatives,, or, according to the idiolect of the speaker, is either written or, as described below.

Sibilants

For the following phonemes, the phrase "at the start of a syllable" can be understood as "at the start of a word, or between a consonant and a vowel, in that order".
Note that there are two main groups of accents in Portuguese, one in which the sibilants are alveolar at the end of syllables, and another in which they are postalveolar. In this position, the sibilants occur in complementary distribution, voiced before voiced consonants, and voiceless before voiceless consonants or at the end of utterances.

Vowels

The vowels in the pairs,, only contrast in stressed syllables. In unstressed syllables, each element of the pair occurs in complementary distribution with the other. Stressed appears mostly before the nasal consonants,,, followed by a vowel, and stressed appears mostly elsewhere although they have a limited number of minimal pairs in EP.
In Brazilian Portuguese, both nasal and unstressed vowel phonemes that only contrast when stressed tend to a mid height though may be often heard in unstressed position. In pre-20th-century European Portuguese, they tended to be raised to, and. It still is the case of most Brazilian dialects in which the word elogio may be variously pronounced as,,, etc. Some dialects, such as those of Northeastern and Southern Brazil, tend to do less pre-vocalic vowel reduction and in general the unstressed vowel sounds adhere to that of one of the stressed vowel pair, namely and respectively.
In educated speech, vowel reduction is used less often than in colloquial and vernacular speech though still more than the more distant dialects, and in general, mid vowels are dominant over close-mid ones and especially open-mid ones in unstressed environments when those are in free variation. Mid vowels are also used as choice for stressed nasal vowels in both Portugal and Rio de Janeiro though not in São Paulo and southern Brazil, but in Bahia, Sergipe and neighboring areas, mid nasal vowels supposedly are close-mid like those of French. Veneno can thus vary as EP, RJ, SP and BA according to the dialect. also has significant variation, as shown in the respective dialect pronunciations of banana as,, and.
Vowel reduction of unstressed nasal vowels is extremely pervasive nationwide in Brazil, in vernacular, colloquial and even most educated speech registers. It is slightly more resisted but still present in Portugal.

Diacritics

The pronunciation of the accented vowels is fairly stable except that they become nasal in certain conditions. See #Nasalization for further information about this regular phenomenon. In other cases, nasal vowels are marked with a tilde.
The grave accent is only used on the letter and is merely grammatical, meaning a crasis between two such as the preposition a "a" and a "the ". In dialects where unstressed represents, represents ; in dialects where unstressed is the grave accent makes no difference in pronunciation.
There was a proposal to use the grave for separation of unstressed diphthongs, e.g.: saìmento, paìsagem, saùdar.
The trema was official prior to the last orthographical reform and can still be found in older texts. It meant that the usually silent between or and or is in fact pronounced: líqüido "liquid" and sangüíneo "related to blood". Some words have two acceptable pronunciations, varying largely by accents.
It was also proposed to use the grave accent instead of trema, e.g.: líqùido, sangùíneo.

Diphthongs

The pronunciation of each diphthong is also fairly predictable, but one must know how to distinguish true diphthongs from adjacent vowels in hiatus, which belong to separate syllables. For example, in the word saio, the forms a clearer diphthong with the previous vowel, but in saiu, it forms a diphthong with the next vowel. As in Spanish, a hiatus may be indicated with an acute accent, distinguishing homographs such as saia and saía.

Nasalization

When a syllable ends with or, the consonant is not fully pronounced but merely indicates the nasalization of the vowel which precedes it. At the end of words, it generally produces a nasal diphthong.
The letter is conventionally written before or or at the end of words, and is written before other consonants. In the plural, the ending - changes into -; for example bem, rim, bom, um → bens, rins, bons, uns. Some loaned words end with -.
Nasalization of, according to modern orthography, is left unmarked in the six words muito, muita, muitos, muitas, mui, ruim. During some periods, the nasal was marked as : mũi, mũita, mũito, mũitas, mũitos.
The word endings -am, -em, -en, with or without an accent mark on the vowel, represent nasal diphthongs derived from various Latin endings, often la-ant, -unt or -en-. Final -, which appears in polysyllabic verbs, is always unstressed. The grapheme -- is also pronounced as a nasal diphthong in a few compound words, such as bendito, homenzinho, and Benfica.

Morphological considerations

Nouns which end in - often have a corresponding verb whose infinitive ends in -; these verbs retain in their conjugations, even in forms that are pronounced identically to the corresponding noun, e.g. viagem "voyage " but viajem.
Verbs whose thematic vowel becomes a stressed in one of their inflections are spelled with an in the whole conjugation, as are other words of the same family: crio "I create" implies criar "to create" and criatura "creature".
Verbs whose thematic vowel becomes a stressed in one of their inflections are spelled with an in the whole conjugation, as are other words of the same family: nomeio "I nominate" implies nomear "to nominate" and nomeação "nomination".

Etymological considerations

The majority of the Portuguese lexicon is derived from Latin, Celtic, Greek, some Germanic and some Arabic. Greek words are Latinized before being incorporated into the language, and many words of Latin or Greek origin have easily recognizable cognates in English and other western European languages and are spelled according to similar principles. For instance, glória "glory", glorioso "glorious", herança "inheritance", real "real/royal". Some general guidelines for spelling are given below:

vs. : if is pronounced syllabically, it is written with, as in cueca "male underwear", and if it represents a labialized velar plosive, it is written with, as in quando "when".
vs. : etymological, if representing a phoneme, changes into before.
: this letter is silent; it appears for etymology at the start of a word, in a few interjections, and as part of the digraphs,,. Latin or Greek,,,, and are usually converted into,,,, and, respectively.
vs. : in many words, the variant normally corresponds to Latin and Arabic or, more rarely to Latin,.
/ vs. /: the letter and the digraph correspond to Latin,, or, and to Spanish. The graphemes and are usually derived from Latin or, or from in non-European languages, such as Arabic and Amerindian languages. They often correspond to Spanish in any position or preceding or. At the beginning of words, however, is written instead of etymological, by convention.
vs. between vowels: the letter corresponds to Latin or, to Greek or Arabic. Intervocalic corresponds to Latin.
vs. : the letter derives from Latin or, or from Arabic and usually corresponds to Spanish. The digraph derives from Latin,, or from French and corresponds to Spanish or .
vs. vs. at the end of syllables: is the most common spelling for all sibilants. The letter appears, preceded by and followed by one of the voiceless consonants, in some words derived from Latin or Greek. The letter occurs only at the end of oxytone words and in compounds derived from them, corresponding to Latin, or to Arabic.

Loanwords with a in their original languages receive the letter to represent it when they are nativised: xampu "shampoo". While many dialects merged the pronunciations of and long ago, some Galician-Portuguese dialects like Uruguayan Portuguese and the speech registers of northeastern Portugal and Galicia still preserve the difference as vs., as do other Iberian languages. When one wants to stress the sound difference in dialects in which it merged the convention is to use : tchau "ciao" and República Tcheca "Czech Republic". In most loanwords, it merges with, just as most often merges with. Alveolar affricates and, though, are more likely to be preserved, although not all of these hold up across some dialects

Syllabification and collation

Portuguese syllabification rules require a syllable break between double letters:,,,,,, or other combinations of letters that may be pronounced as a single sound: fric-ci-o-nar, pro-ces-so, car-ro, ex-ce-to, ex-su-dar. Only the digraphs,,,, are indivisible. All digraphs are however broken down into their constituent letters for the purposes of collation, spelling aloud, and in crossword puzzles.

Other symbols

Apostrophe

The apostrophe appears as part of certain phrases, usually to indicate the elision of a vowel in the contraction of a preposition with the word that follows it: de + água = d'água. It is used almost exclusively in poetry.

Hyphen

The hyphen is used to make compound words, especially plants and animal names like papagaio-de-rabo-vermelho "red-tailed parrot".
It is also extensively used to append clitic pronouns to the verb, as in quero-o "I want it", or even to embed them within the verb, as in levaria + vos + os = levar-vo-los-ia "I would take them to you". Proclitic pronouns are not connected graphically to the verb: não o quero "I do not want it". Each element in such compounds is treated as an individual word for accentuation purposes: matarias + o = matá-lo-ias "You would kill it/him", beberá + a = bebê-la-á "He/she will drink it".

Quotation marks

In European Portuguese, as in many other European languages, angular quotation marks are used for general quotations in literature:
Although American-style or British-style quotation marks are sometimes used as well, especially in less formal types of writing or inside nested quotations, they are less common in careful writing. In Brazilian Portuguese, only American and British-style quote marks are used.
In both varieties of the language, dashes are normally used for direct speech rather than quotation marks:

Brazilian vs. European spelling

Prior to the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990, Portuguese had two orthographic standards:

The Brazilian orthography, official in Brazil.
The European orthography, official in Portugal, Macau, East Timor and the five African Lusophone countries.

The table to the right illustrates typical differences between the two orthographies. Some are due to different pronunciations, but others are merely graphic. The main ones are:Presence or absence of certain consonants: The letters and appear in some words before, or in one orthography, but are absent from the other. Normally, the letter is written down in the European spelling, but not in the Brazilian spelling.Different use of diacritics: the Brazilian spelling has, or followed by or before a vowel, in several words where the European orthography has, or, due to different pronunciation.Different usage of double letters: also due to different pronunciation, Brazilian spelling has only, and as double letters. So, Portuguese connosco becomes Brazilian conosco and words ended in with suffix -mente added, become ruimente and comumente in Brazilian spelling.
As of 2016, the reformed orthography under the 1990 agreement is obligatory in Brazil, Cape Verde, and Portugal, but most adult people do not use it.

Convention	Portuguese-speaking countries except Brazil before the 1990 agreement	Brazil before the 1990 agreement	All countries after the 1990 agreement	translation
Different pronunciation	anónimo	anônimo	Both forms remain	anonymous
Different pronunciation	Vénus	Vênus	Both forms remain	Venus
Different pronunciation	facto	fato	Both forms remain	fact
Different pronunciation	ideia	idéia	ideia	idea
Silent consonants	acção	ação	ação	action
Silent consonants	direcção	direção	direção	direction
Silent consonants	eléctrico	elétrico	elétrico	electric
Silent consonants	óptimo	ótimo	ótimo	optimal
Diacritics	pinguim	pingüim	pinguim	penguin
Diacritics	voo	vôo	voo	flight
Non-personal and non-geographical names	Janeiro	janeiro	janeiro	January