Symbols
99Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
Alphabet A to M
Each accented letter sits under its base letter: Á À Â Ã under A, Ç under C.
Alphabet N to Z
K, W and Y have been official letters again since the 1990 Orthographic Agreement.
Punctuation and ordinals
Currency
Where it's spoken
Countries where Portuguese is an official and widely spoken language, largest first.
On the map
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Portuguese letters with accents: the full alphabet
The Portuguese alphabet has 26 letters, the same A to Z as English. K, W and Y were long treated as foreign and only returned officially with the 1990 Orthographic Agreement, which Brazil and Portugal put into force from 2009; today they appear in borrowed words such as kiwi and watt, in names like Wagner and Yasmin, and in symbols like km and kg.
On top of those 26, standard spelling uses eleven accented vowels and one c with a cedilla, each with a capital: Á á, À à, Â â, Ã ã, É é, Ê ê, Í í, Ó ó, Ô ô, Õ õ, Ú ú and Ç ç. The grid also has Ò ò, which Unicode's CLDR lists for Portuguese: you will meet it in spellings from before the 1970s, such as sòzinho, rather than in everyday writing today.
None of these count as separate letters. In dictionaries and sorted lists, á, â and ã file under a, and ç under c. Sounds that other languages give their own letter are written with two plain ones in Portuguese: lh, nh, ch, rr and ss (filho, ninho, chave, carro, passo). So there is no Portuguese ñ to look for: nh does that job, as in Spanish España and Portuguese Espanha.
Portuguese accent marks and what each one does
The acute accent (acento agudo) marks the stressed syllable and, on e and o, an open vowel: café, avó, família, útil, já. The circumflex (acento circunflexo) also marks stress, but on a closed vowel: avô, você, câmara, três. The difference matters: avó is grandmother and avô is grandfather.
The tilde (til) on ã and õ makes the vowel nasal, and it sits on the most typical sounds of the language: não, mãe, pão, irmã, coração, lições, São Paulo. The grave accent (acento grave) has one job today, the crase: it marks the contraction of the preposition a with the feminine article a/as or the initial a of a demonstrative, as in Vou à praia (I'm going to the beach), às and àquele. The cedilla turns c into an s sound before a, o and u: açúcar, coração, Gonçalves. A Portuguese word never starts with ç.
Accents tell many words apart: e (and) and é (is), pais (parents) and país (country), por (by) and pôr (to put), pode (can) and pôde (could), and the classic trio sábia (wise woman), sabia (knew) and sabiá, a thrush. Brazil also used the diaeresis ü (lingüiça, freqüente) until the 1990 Agreement removed it, so today it is linguiça and frequente.
How to type Portuguese accents on a keyboard
On Windows, add the United States-International layout (or the Portuguese or Brazilian one) in Settings. US-International turns the quote keys into dead keys: ' then a gives á, ` then a gives à, ^ then a gives â, ~ then a gives ã, ~ then o gives õ, and ' then c gives ç; press the accent key and then Space for the plain mark. Without changing layout, hold Alt and type a code on the number pad: Alt0227 ã, Alt0245 õ, Alt0231 ç, Alt0199 Ç, Alt0225 á, Alt0224 à, Alt0226 â, Alt0233 é, Alt0234 ê, Alt0237 í, Alt0243 ó, Alt0244 ô, Alt0250 ú, Alt0186 º, Alt0170 ª.
On a Mac with the US or ABC layout, press Option with a key, let go, then type the letter: OptionE for á é í ó ú, Option for à, OptionI for â ê ô, OptionN for ã õ, and OptionC for ç (ShiftOptionC for Ç). Option9 and Option0 give ª and º, and Option\ and ShiftOption\ give « and ». Holding a letter key down also opens a small menu of its accented forms.
On iPhone and Android, long-press a, e, i, o, u or c and slide to the letter you want, or add a Portuguese keyboard for autocorrect that fills in accents. Brazilian ABNT2 keyboards and Portuguese keyboards in Portugal have their own Ç key and dead keys for , so native typists never need codes. In HTML, the named entities are ã õ ç á ê º and so on, or simply paste the characters from this page into a UTF-8 file.
Portuguese punctuation, ordinals and currency signs
Portuguese has no ¿ or ¡: questions and exclamations end with ? and ! as in English. Quotation marks differ by country. Portugal traditionally uses guillemets « », with “ ” inside them, while Brazil uses “ ” with ‘ ’ inside. In novels and transcripts, both countries open each line of dialogue with a long dash, the travessão (—).
The ordinal indicators ª and º are small raised letters a and o written after numbers: 1º (primeiro, first, masculine), 1ª (primeira, feminine), 2º andar (second floor), nº for número. Portugal usually adds a full stop (1.º, 1.ª), Brazil writes 1º. They are not the degree sign , which looks similar but is a small circle rather than a letter o.
Portugal pays in euros and usually writes the sign after the amount with a decimal comma: 2,50 . Brazil's real is written R in front: R 49,90. That dollar-like sign is also the cifrão, which Cape Verde's escudo (and Portugal's escudo before the euro) puts where the decimal point would go, so 100 is one escudo. Angola's kwanza (Kz) and Mozambique's metical (MT) are written with letters. , the cruzeiro sign, comes from the cruzeiro, Brazil's currency at several points between 1942 and 1993, before the real arrived in 1994.
Where Portuguese is spoken
Portuguese has roughly 250 million speakers by CLDR's estimate, and about four in five of them live in Brazil (around 200 million). Next come Angola (about 25 million), Portugal (about 10 million) and Mozambique (about 9 million), then Guinea-Bissau, Timor-Leste, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. It is also co-official in Macau and an official language of Equatorial Guinea, where few people speak it, and large communities live abroad, close to 900,000 speakers in France by the same estimates.
Spelling is almost the same everywhere, with a few regular differences. Where Brazil pronounces a closed vowel and Portugal an open one, the accent changes with it: Antônio, econômico, bebê in Brazil, António, económico, bebé in Portugal. Portugal also keeps some consonants it pronounces and Brazil does not, as in facto (Brazil fato). The Brazil and Portugal collections have the characters and emoji tied to each country.
Portuguese is closest to Galician, spoken in north-west Spain, and shares á é í ó ú with Spanish. Portuguese also writes ã õ ç â ê ô à, which Spanish does not use, while Spanish has ñ and the inverted ¿ ¡; the Spanish letters collection has those.
How to use them
5 situationsClick to copyPortuguese Letters & Accents combos
14Worth knowing
- For most of the 20th century K, W and Y were officially outside the Portuguese alphabet; the 1990 Orthographic Agreement brought them back, taking it from 23 to 26 letters.
- The cedilla's name comes from Old Spanish zedilla, 'little z'. Spanish itself gave up ç in the 18th century, while Portuguese, French and Catalan kept it.
- sábia, sabia and sabiá are three different words, a wise woman, 'knew' and a thrush, told apart only by where the accent falls.
- Brazilians write Antônio and the Portuguese write António: the same name with a different accent, because the o sounds closed in Brazil and open in Portugal.
Questions people ask
8How do I copy and paste Portuguese letters?
Click or tap any letter on this page to copy it, then paste with CtrlV, CmdV, or long-press and Paste on a phone.
What are the Portuguese accent marks?
Five marks: the acute (á é í ó ú, marks stress; e and o are open), the circumflex (â ê ô, stressed and closed), the tilde (ã õ, nasal), the grave (à, only for crase) and the cedilla under ç (an s sound).
How many letters are in the Portuguese alphabet?
26, the same A to Z as English, since the 1990 Orthographic Agreement brought back K, W and Y. Accented letters and ç are not counted as separate letters.
How do you type ã on a Mac?
Press OptionN, let go, then press a (or o for õ). For capitals, press OptionN and then ShiftA. You can also hold the a key down and pick ã from the menu.
How do I type Portuguese accents on a Windows keyboard?
Switch to the US-International layout and type the accent key before the letter (' a á, a ã, e ê, ' c ç), or hold Alt and type a number-pad code such as Alt0227 for ã.
What is the alt code for ç?
Alt0231 gives ç and Alt0199 gives Ç, typed on the number pad while holding Alt.
What is the difference between á and â in Portuguese?
Both mark the stressed syllable. The acute shows an open vowel and the circumflex a closed one, which is why avó (grandmother) and avô (grandfather) are different words.
Does Portuguese use ¿ and ¡ like Spanish?
No. Portuguese questions and exclamations end with ordinary ? and !, with nothing at the start of the sentence.
