The Portuguese Alphabet: All 26 Letters, Sounds, and How to Say Them

The Portuguese alphabet chart (all 26 letters)

Here's the whole thing in one table. Each row gives you the letter, its Portuguese name, how that name sounds when you say it out loud, the sound the letter makes inside a word, and a real example word with its meaning. The letters and the example words stay the same in every language.

This chart uses Brazilian Portuguese, the variety most learners start with. Where European Portuguese differs in a way that matters, later sections say so plainly.

Treat those 26 example words as your first vocabulary list. When you want a bigger set, the 100 essential Portuguese words lesson picks up where this chart stops.

How do you say the Portuguese letter names?

Spot the pattern in that middle column and you've saved yourself a lot of memorizing. Most consonants are simply the letter plus "eh": bê, cê, dê, pê, tê, vê, zê. A second group wraps the letter in vowels instead: efe, ele, eme, ene, erre, esse.

Here's the trick nobody tells beginners. In Brazil, an unstressed e at the end of a word is pronounced "ee," not "eh." So efe is "EH-fee" and ele is "EH-lee." Learn that one habit here and it pays off in thousands of real words later.

Four letter names change depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on:

None of these will get you misunderstood. Pick the Brazilian column if Brazil is your target, and just recognize the other names when you hear them. The name i grego means "Greek i," the same idea behind the Spanish name for the same letter.

Why are K, W and Y in the Portuguese alphabet?

If an older textbook told you Portuguese has 23 letters, it wasn't wrong at the time. K, W and Y sat outside the official alphabet for most of the twentieth century, treated as foreign guests rather than residents.

That changed with the Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa, the Orthographic Agreement signed in Lisbon on 16 December 1990 by the Portuguese-speaking countries. Among other reforms, it put K, W and Y back on the official list and brought the count to 26, matching the basic Latin alphabet.

Agreements take a while to reach real life. Brazil ratified in 1995 but only began applying the new rules on 1 January 2009, with a long transition period during which both spellings were accepted. That transition ended in January 2016, and the reformed spelling has been the only correct one in Brazil since. You can read the full history in the Wikipedia entry on the 1990 Agreement.

So where do you actually meet these three letters? Their official status changed, but their job didn't. K, W and Y show up in borrowed words (kiwi, wifi, yoga, show, software), in foreign names (Kafka, Washington), and in symbols and units (km, kg, kW). No word built from Portuguese roots uses them. If you see a K, you're almost certainly looking at something imported.

Portuguese digraphs: two letters, one sound

A digraph is a pair of letters that spells a single sound. They aren't letters of the alphabet and they don't have their own names, but you'll hit them in your first week, so learn them alongside the chart above.

Two of these deserve a warning. The ch in Portuguese is not the ch of English "church," and it isn't the throaty ch of German either. It's a plain "sh." And ss exists precisely because a single s between two vowels turns into a 'z' sound, so passo (step) keeps its hiss while casa (house) sounds like "KAH-zah."

The gu and qu pairs hide their u only before e and i. In água (water) and quatro (four) you pronounce the u perfectly normally. The full set of spelling rules behind these pairs is documented in Portuguese orthography.

Portuguese accents and diacritics

Portuguese uses five marks. They aren't decoration, and they aren't optional. Each one tells you something specific about stress or vowel quality, and skipping one can change the word.

The difference between the acute and the circumflex is easiest to feel with one famous pair: avó means grandmother and avô means grandfather. Same four letters, different hat, different relative. Avó opens the mouth wide ("ah-VAW"), avô rounds it ("ah-VOH"). Get these backwards at a family dinner and everyone will notice.

The cedilla is the mark English speakers handle best, because French uses it too. Ç is simply a c doing an 's' job in front of a, o or u, which is why açúcar (sugar) isn't "ah-KOO-car." For a full worked example of the cedilla and the accented í together, see how açaí is really pronounced.

The nasal vowels (ã and õ)

This is the sound learners struggle with most, and it's worth slowing down for. A nasal vowel isn't a vowel plus an n. It's one sound made with air escaping through your nose at the same time as your mouth.

You already produce nasal vowels in English without noticing. Say "sing" and hold the vowel before the final consonant, and that resonance in your nose is the effect you want. Now say maçã ("mah-SAN") without ever closing your mouth for the n. That's the target.

The til also appears in the endings -ão, -ões and -ãe. Nasality is contagious in Portuguese: a vowel before m or n picks it up too, which is why bem and um sound nasal with no accent mark in sight.

The Portuguese sounds English speakers get wrong

Five traps account for most beginner mistakes. Work through these and your reading accent improves faster than any amount of vocabulary drilling.

The R at the start of a word is an H. This is the big one. In most of Brazil, an initial r is a breathy sound from the back of the throat, close to English 'h.' Rio is "HEE-oo," not "REE-oh." Rua (street) starts like "who." It feels wrong for weeks, then it clicks.

RR does the same thing. Double rr in the middle of a word gets that same throaty h, so carro (car) is roughly "KAH-ho" and guerra (war) is "GEH-ha." Contrast that with a single r between vowels, which is a light tap almost identical to the middle of American "ladder." Caro (expensive) and carro (car) are different words, so the pair is worth drilling. European Portuguese uses a growlier version made further back in the throat, and some Brazilian regions still use a trill. If you want the tongue mechanics behind a true rolled r, our guide to rolling your R's covers them, though Brazilian Portuguese won't ask you for one.

The -ão ending. Written -ão, it's a single gliding nasal sound: start on a nasal "ah" and slide toward "ow," all through the nose. Mão (hand), pão (bread) and coração (heart) all end this way. The plural usually swaps to -ões, so coração becomes corações.

D and T before an i sound. Across most of Brazil, d before an i turns into the 'j' of "jeep" and t before an i turns into the 'ch' of "cheese." Dia (day) is "JEE-ah." This catches learners out because a final unstressed e is pronounced "ee" too, so it triggers the same change: noite (night) is "NOY-chee" and cidade (city) is "see-DAH-jee." Portugal does not do this at all, saying "NOY-tuh" instead, and a few Brazilian regions skip it as well. It isn't a rule you can apply blindly, but in São Paulo or Rio you'll hear it constantly.

LH and NH are one sound, not two. Resist the urge to say "fil-ho." The lh in filho (son) is the sound in the middle of "million" said as one smooth movement, and nh in manhã (morning) is the "ny" of "canyon."

One last regional note, since it affects nearly every plural you'll say. A final s is a clean 's' in São Paulo and much of Brazil, but a 'sh' in Rio de Janeiro and in Portugal. Both are standard. Curious where these varieties came from? Which language they speak in Brazil has the background.