Brazilian Portuguese Alphabet

The Complete Alphabet

Letter names and basic sounds:

Spelling Names

• "Meu nome é Ana. A-N-A." (My name is Ana. A-N-A.)

• "João. J-O-Ã-O. J de José, O, A com til, O." (João. J-O-Ã-O. J as in José, O, A with a tilde, O.)

• "É Smith. S-M-I-T-H. S de sapo..." (It's Smith. S-M-I-T-H. S as in sapo.)

• "Com dois S. C-A-S-S-I-O." (With two S's. C-A-S-S-I-O.)

Common Acronyms

• CPF [se-pe-ˈɛfi] (tax ID)

• RG [ˈɛʁi-ˈʒe] (ID card)

• CEP [se-ɛ-ˈpe] (zip code)

• USP [u-ˈɛsi-ˈpe] (University of São Paulo)

H is always silent

• Never pronounced: hotel[o-TEW], homem[OH-mem]

• Except in CH, LH, NH

• But spelled out: "agá"

X has four sounds

Doubled letters

K, W and Y left the core alphabet, then returned

From 1943 to 2009, Brazilian spelling rules listed 23 core letters, while still allowing K, W and Y in special cases such as foreign names and international symbols. The 1943 Formulário Ortográfico often replaced them with c, qu or v in adapted words; the 1990 spelling agreement, which took effect in Brazil in 2009, restored them to the 26-letter alphabet. So the "new" letters were returning letters, not letters that had been forbidden everywhere.

Sources: 1943 Portuguese Orthographic Form (Wikipedia), 1990 Orthographic Agreement (Wikipedia).

"Cedilha" literally means "little z"

The word cedilha comes from the Spanish diminutive cedilla ("little ceda/zeta"). In medieval Visigothic script, a tailed variant of the letter z (ꝣ) was written beside a c to mark a /ts/ sound; over time that little z fused into the curly tail we now write as ç. Portuguese kept the cedilha; Spanish officially dropped it in 1726.