Months of the year in Portuguese: how to say them

The months of the year in Portuguese are janeiro, fevereiro, março, abril, maio, junho, julho, agosto, setembro, outubro, novembro and dezembro. They are written without a capital letter and they are all masculine. In Portuguese film and television dialogue the month mentioned most is setembro, and the one mentioned least is fevereiro.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 4 min read

The twelve months

The last column is how many times the word is said per million words of Brazilian subtitles. The pronunciations are Brazilian.

Four sounds to watch. J is the s of English "measure", so janeiro, junho and julho start with it. Nh is the ny of "canyon" and lh is close to the lli of "million", which is all that separates junho from julho. Ç is always an s sound: março. And in Brazil a final l is said like a w, so abril ends in "eew".

Where the names come from

All twelve names are Roman. The Romans named the first months of their year for gods and festivals, and then ran out of ideas and counted.

• January is the month of Janus, the god of doorways and beginnings, and February is named for februa, a festival of purification held in it.
• March belongs to Mars, May to the goddess Maia and June to Juno. The origin of April, Latin Aprilis, is not known for certain.
• July and August were once Quintilis and Sextilis, the "fifth" and "sixth" months. They were renamed for Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus.
• September, October, November and December are simply "seventh", "eighth", "ninth" and "tenth", from Latin septem, octo, novem and decem.

The numbers are two out because the early Roman year began in March. When January became the first month, the names stayed where they were, so the "seventh" month is now the ninth. Portuguese keeps the Roman names for its months, even though it replaced the Roman names of its weekdays with numbers: Monday is segunda-feira, the "second day". That story is in the days of the week in Portuguese.

How to use them

• No capital letter. The spelling agreement of 1990, which Brazil and Portugal both follow, gives days, months and seasons a small letter: Nasci em maio, "I was born in May".
• "In May" is em maio. No mês de maio is "in the month of May".
• A date joins everything with de: 3 de maio de 2027, "the third of May 2027". "On the third of May" is no dia 3 de maio or em 3 de maio.
• The first of the month usually takes the ordinal: primeiro de maio. Um de maio is also heard, especially in Portugal.
• "This", "next", "last": este mês, o mês que vem or o próximo mês, o mês passado.
• To ask the date: Que dia é hoje?
• Dates are written day first: 3/5/2027 is the third of May.

The seasons

"In summer" is no verão; "in spring", na primavera. In Brazil, south of the equator, the seasons fall the other way round from Portugal's: dezembro is a summer month.

Which month do Portuguese films say most?

Setembro, at 19.0 per million words in Brazilian subtitles, ahead of maio and julho. Fevereiro is last at 10.7. The subtitles of Portugal agree at both ends: setembro first, at 18.8, and fevereiro last, at 9.9.

February is also the least-mentioned month in Italian and German subtitles, and September leads in Italian too. Most of these subtitles are translations of the same films, so the pattern says more about what stories mention than about Brazil or Portugal.

Learn them in a sentence

• Em que mês você nasceu? — What month were you born in?
• Nasci em julho. — I was born in July.
• Hoje é 3 de maio. — Today is the third of May.
• Até setembro! — See you in September!
• O Natal é em dezembro. — Christmas is in December.

Dates need numbers: numbers 1 to 100 in Portuguese has them all. The months are among the most common Portuguese words, and the Portuguese course, Verbavia (our own course), teaches them with dates and times, free on the web. The hundred words said most of all are explained in the 100 most common Portuguese words.

Another set every beginner needs: colours in Portuguese, ranked by how often films say each one.

Sources

• Priberam, Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa: janeiro, fevereiro, julho, agosto and setembro, for the Latin origin of each name.
• The 1990 Orthographic Agreement, Base XIX, on Wikisource): lower case for the names of days, months and seasons.
• Wikipedia: Roman calendar, on the year that began in March, the numbered months, and the renaming of Quintilis and Sextilis.
• The counts are from OpenSubtitles 2018 (Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J., 2016, aclanthology.org) through Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords lists, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, github.com. They are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py and printed from its output rather than typed.