Numbers 0-1000

A new lesson, and a genuinely useful one. Most of Portuguese counting is regular — once you've got 0–20 and the tens, you build almost anything by gluing the parts together with e ("and"). Three small rules do the heavy lifting: gender on a couple of numbers, the e connector, and two special words (cem and mil).

Step 1 — Memorize 0 to 20

No patterns here, just the foundation:

Prices at the feira

• "Quanto custa?" "Doze reais." (How much? Twelve reais.)

• "Custa cento e cinquenta reais." (It costs 150 reais.)

• "São vinte e cinco reais." (That's 25 reais.)

How many?

• "Quero duas cervejas." (I want two beers.)

• "Mesa para quatro pessoas." (Table for four people.)

• "Tem duzentas pessoas na festa." (There are 200 people at the party.)

Age

• "Tenho vinte e três anos." (I'm 23 years old.)

catorze or quatorze?

Both are correct for 14. Brazilians lean toward catorze, but nobody will blink at quatorze.

cem vs. cento

cem is 100 standing alone; the moment a number follows, it becomes cento e…:

• ✅ cem reais · ✅ cento e dez reais · ❌ "cento reais"

Never "um mil"

1000 is just mil, never "um mil". (But you do say dois mil, três mil for 2000 and 3000.)

Don't drop the gender on hundreds

It's easy to forget that 200+ agrees with the noun:

Brazilians almost never say seis when reading a number out loud — they say meia, short for meia dúzia ("half a dozen", since a dozen is twelve). The habit goes back to the noisy telephone lines of the 1930s, where operators kept mishearing seis as três, so people swapped in meia to keep the wires straight — and it stuck. To this day a Brazilian giving you their phone number will say "meia" for every 6.

Sources: Mega Curioso, Curta Mais