The most common Brazilian Portuguese words

Every word on this page and four thousand more, as a spreadsheet: rank, word, part of speech, meaning, and the example sentence in Portuguese and English. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, and imports into Anki, Quizlet and most flashcard apps.

The list is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. The ranking is built from the Brazilian Portuguese subtitles of OpenSubtitles (FrequencyWords by Hermit Dave, CC BY-SA 4.0), the meanings from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0), and the example sentences were written for learners by Verbeto and are still being reviewed. None is a quotation.

Fewer than you might think to get going. In the Brazilian film and television subtitles this list is built from, the 100 most common words make up about 58% of everything said, the top 1,000 about 80%, and the top 5,000 about 88%.

As a rough guide: around 1,000 words carry you through everyday conversation; 2,000–3,000 let you read most of a modern novel with some help; literature, the news and specialist subjects keep asking for more. The last few per cent of words on a page are the rare ones, and they are where the meaning often is — which is why reading with help on every word beats waiting until you know them all.

Portuguese itself has hundreds of thousands of words, counting every technical term, but nobody knows them all; an educated native speaker recognises tens of thousands.

How many do you know? The free level test estimates your vocabulary in two minutes

A list is a good map and a poor teacher. A word learned alone, from a list or a flashcard, is easy to recognise and hard to use, because you never met it doing anything. Meet the same word in a story — who said it, to whom, what happened next — and it sticks.

That's what Verbeto is for. You read real Brazilian books and stories at your level, tap any word you don't know for its meaning in that sentence, and it becomes a card you review later, with the sentence you found it in.