The 100 most common Portuguese verbs, in order

The most common Portuguese verbs, in Brazilian speech, are ser and estar (both "to be"), ir (to go), ter (to have), poder (can), fazer (to do, to make), saber (to know), querer (to want), dizer (to say) and ver (to see). We counted every form of every verb — é, sou, era, será, seja all under ser; estava, estou, tá all under estar — across 426 million words of Brazilian film and television dialogue, and ranked the verbs by the total. The full hundred are below, with the rules for counting Portuguese verbs, which turn out to be their own small lesson in the language.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 13 min read

The ten that do most of the work

Together the top ten account for 52.4% of all the verb forms we counted, and the top hundred for 87.6%. Three things about the top of the list are specifically Portuguese.

• Ser and estar split "to be" the way Spanish does. Ser is what something permanently is; estar is a state or a place. A learner who has studied Spanish already knows the distinction; a learner who has not meets it here, in the two commonest verbs in the language.
• Ter does almost everything tener and haver together do in Spanish. Portuguese has only one everyday verb for possession and for the perfect tenses: tenho ("I have"), tenho feito ("I have been doing"). Haver survives mostly as the impersonal "there is" — see below.
• Ir is third, just ahead of ter and propped up by three single forms — vai, vamos and vou — a verb a learner needs almost immediately, because Brazilian Portuguese builds its everyday future on it (more on that below too).

Ter versus haver: one verb absorbed the other's job

In Spanish, tener (to have, to possess) and haber (the perfect auxiliary, and "there is") are two different, equally essential verbs. In Brazilian Portuguese, ter does both jobs — "I have a car" is tenho um carro, and "I have done it" is tenho feito isso — and haver is largely reduced to the impersonal construction há, "there is" or "there are". The counts show exactly how lopsided that split is:

Haver as "to have" (hei de ir, "I am to go") is formal and literary; a Brazilian speaker reaches for ter every time English would reach for either "have" or "there is going to be". Spanish keeps both verbs busy; Portuguese retired one of them to a single fixed phrase.

The spoken contractions of estar

Brazilian speech shortens estar in ways the spelling hides. Tá (for está), tô (for estou) and tava (for estava) are all over everyday dialogue, counted here under estar because that is plainly what they are:

291.2 per million words for tá alone — about 42.9 for tô and 19.2 for tava. One contraction is deliberately left out: tão for estão ("they are") exists, but the ordinary adverb tão ("so", as in tão bonito, "so pretty") is said 1,294 times per million words, which would swamp any real count of the verb. And pra, the spoken contraction of para ("for", "to"), is not a verb at all and is not counted anywhere here — it is a preposition, said 1,321 times per million words, almost all of it short for the 11,202-per-million preposition, never for a verb.

The list

"Per million words" is how often the verb's forms, all added together, are said in the subtitle corpus. "First form in our list" is where the verb, or the first of its forms, appears in our list of the most common Portuguese words.

Brazilian Portuguese has a tense Spanish, French and Italian do not use

Portuguese keeps a future subjunctive, for something not yet true: quando eu for ("when I go"), se ele vier ("if he comes"), se você puder ("if you can"). It is built the same way for every verb, regular or not: take the preterite's "they" form, which always ends -ram, and drop the final -am. Foram ("they were, they went") gives for; fizeram ("they did") gives fizer; tiveram ("they had") gives tiver. That one rule is also how the imperfect subjunctive is built (drop -ram instead, add -sse: fosse, fizesse, tivesse), which is why the two tenses always share a stem.

The future subjunctive is not a museum piece. These forms are all in ordinary use:

Ser and ir go further than sharing a pattern: their entire preterite, imperfect subjunctive and future subjunctive are the same words — foi is both "was" and "went", and for, fosse and the rest follow. That is exactly the situation the Spanish post describes for fue, and no word count can split it here either: those forms are counted for neither verb below, worth 5,315 per million words that would otherwise lift ser even further ahead.

Why the everyday future is ir, not a verb ending

Portuguese has a normal, one-word future tense — farei, "I will do" — and in speech it mostly loses to ir plus an infinitive: vou fazer, "I'm going to do it". Farei alone is said 118.4 times per million words; vou alone is said 2675.8 times, more than twenty times as often, and that is before adding vai and vamos, which build the same construction for "he/she is going to" and "we are going to". Dizer's one-word future, direi, fares no better at 45.1 per million. A learner who drills the synthetic future tense before ir plus an infinitive has the order backwards for Brazilian Portuguese.

Enclitic pronouns: a feature this corpus barely has

European Portuguese writes object pronouns joined onto certain verb forms with a hyphen — dá-me ("give me"), chamo-me ("I am called") — and a grammar of Portuguese will teach this. It is not a counting problem for Brazilian Portuguese: we found 0 such hyphenated forms (anything ending in -me, -te, -se, -lhe, -o, -a and so on after a hyphen) anywhere in our 426 million-word corpus. Brazilian speech puts the pronoun before the verb instead — me dá, eu me chamo — so dá and chamo are ordinary, separate words here, counted under dar and chamar like any other form.

How it was counted

Every form, generated. Our Portuguese course list has no column marking a row as a verb form and no note saying which verb a form belongs to, so — as with the Italian list — every verb's forms were generated from conjugation rules: the three regular classes with their spelling changes (fico/fiquei, chego/cheguei, começo/comece, conheço/conheces, protejo/proteges), about twenty genuinely irregular verbs from their principal parts, and the single rule above that derives the future and imperfect subjunctive of every verb, regular or not, from its preterite. In all, 14,216 forms of 363 verbs were found in the corpus.

What was left out, and why. A word count cannot tell casa "house" from a form of casar "to marry", so a generated form that is also an everyday word of another kind was left out: como ("how"; also "I eat"), para ("for"; also "stops"), casa, conta ("bill"), peça ("a play"), and 204 forms in all. Vale ("it is worth", from valer) was kept, because our course list's own gloss shows the verb sense as the usual one, the way vale a pena, "it's worth it", is said. Era is the opposite case, and the one we did not resolve in the verb's favour even though it usually could be: unlike the Spanish post, which judged "an era" rare enough beside ser's imperfect to keep it, we left era out here, so ser's true share of speech is a little higher than shown. Every other person of ser's imperfect — eras, éramos, éreis, eram — has no competing meaning and is counted normally.

Two verbs sharing a form, besides ser and ir. Ver's gerund and vender's "I sell" are both vendo; ver's preterite "we saw" and vir's present "we come" are both vimos. Forms like these are left out of both verbs rather than guessed.

So every figure is a floor. A left-out or shared form, and a handful of rarer irregular forms outside the twenty or so verbs we hand-checked, can only make a verb's real count higher.

What to do with this

• Learn ser and estar together, from the start. They are the two commonest verbs in the language, and the choice between them is a decision you make in almost every sentence.
• Learn ter before haver. Brazilian Portuguese needs ter constantly and haver rarely, mostly as há.
• Say vou, vai, vamos before you drill the future tense. That is how Brazilians actually talk about what is coming.
• Follow a course that teaches verbs in frequency order. Verbavia (our own course) teaches Brazilian Portuguese from its frequency list, in hand-written lessons with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections; it is free on the web and works in any browser, including on a phone. The Portuguese course starts with these verbs.

Why Portuguese's sounds, not its grammar, are the real work is in is Portuguese hard to learn, and what the first weeks of study actually look like is in how long it takes to learn Portuguese. How many words you need to speak Portuguese measures the Brazilian and European lists against each other, and Portuguese vs Spanish measures how much of the vocabulary — verbs included — a Spanish speaker already has. The same ranking for Spanish is the 100 most common Spanish verbs, and the two-minute Portuguese vocabulary test estimates how many of these words you already know.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018 (pt_br), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
• Wikipedia: Portuguese grammar — the future subjunctive and the personal infinitive as features that set Portuguese apart; Portuguese conjugation — how the future and imperfect subjunctive are formed from the preterite for every verb; Comparison of Portuguese and Spanish — the future subjunctive as "virtually obsolete in Spanish" but in everyday Portuguese use.
• The conjugation rules, the spelling-change families, and every form kept or left out by hand, with its reason, are in scripts/frequency_verbs_pt.py; the figures are printed from its output in frequency_curves.json rather than typed.