The 100 most common Portuguese words, explained

The 100 most common Portuguese words start with que (that, what), não (no, not), o (the) and de (of). In 426 million words of Brazilian film and television dialogue, the hundred words in the table below make up 51.6% of everything said, and the first ten alone make up 22.3%. Below is the full list with meanings, and then the six things about it a learner should notice.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 5 min read

The 100 most common Portuguese words

"Per million words" is how many times the word is said in a million words of subtitles. "Running total" is the share of all dialogue covered by that word and every word above it.

These are word forms, counted as they are said: é, sou and foi are three rows of one verb, and a verb form names its verb in brackets, so tenho is "(I) have (ter)". That is how a learner first meets them, and it is why this list differs from a dictionary's.

1. Brazilians say "I" and "you" out loud

Você is number 7 and eu is number 9. In Italian, a close relative, io ("I") is down at number 30, because the verb ending already says who is speaking. Portuguese verbs carry the same endings, but Brazilian speech says the pronoun anyway, partly because você takes the same verb form as "he" and "she", so the ending alone no longer tells you who is meant. Ele, ela, nós, eles and vocês are all in the table too.

Tu, the everyday "you" of Portugal, is at number 952 in these Brazilian subtitles, nowhere near the hundred. That split, and the others like it, are set out in Brazilian vs European Portuguese.

2. Seven rows are two words fused into one

Portuguese joins a preposition to the "the" that follows it, and the joined forms are said so often that seven of them make the hundred on their own:

Once the pattern is clear, all seven are one thing to learn. Pelo, dele and nisso are built the same way and follow further down the list.

3. Only three nouns make the hundred

Coisa ("thing") is at number 85, tempo ("time", and also "weather") at 90 and casa ("house, home") at 95. Nearly every other row is a pronoun, an article, a preposition, an adverb or a verb form. Nouns carry what a sentence is about, but there are thousands of them and each one is said comparatively rarely; the words that hold sentences together are said all the time.

4. Two verbs for "to be", and both are near the top

É ("is") is number 6 and está ("is") is number 12. Portuguese has ser for what something is and estar for how or where it is, and between them they put ten rows in the table:

• ser: é, foi, ser, era, sou, são
• estar: está, estou, estava, estão

Foi does double duty: it is the past of ser ("was") and also the past of ir ("went"), so ele foi médico is "he was a doctor" and ele foi ao médico is "he went to the doctor". Ir has three more rows of its own, vai, vamos and vou, because Brazilians make the future with it: vou fazer is "I'm going to do". Added up form by form, the verbs are ranked in the 100 most common Portuguese verbs.

5. "Não" is second, and it brings company

Portuguese uses one word for both "no" and "not", puts it in front of the verb, and keeps it when the sentence already has a negative word: não vejo nada, literally "I don't see nothing". Nada and nunca ("never") are both in the table. Spanish does the same with its no, which is the third most common word in Spanish.

6. Some rows are two different words

The subtitle count cannot tell the two apart, so each pair shares one row, and the meaning column lists both. The grammatical sense is nearly always the commoner one: para is "for" far more often than it is "stops".

How to learn them

1. Learn them in sentences, not as a list. Se, me and lhe have no one-word English equivalent.
2. Learn the fused words as the table above. De + o = do is one rule, not seven words.
3. Learn the two verbs for “to be” side by side. Which one to use is the first real decision Portuguese asks of you.
4. Learn each common verb as a small family. Tenho, tem, temos, têm are four forms and one thing to learn.

How far the next thousand words take you is measured in how many words you need to speak Portuguese. Verbavia (our own course) teaches Portuguese vocabulary in frequency order, with a recording of each word: the course's Portuguese word list gives the first thousand in order with translations and a download, the two-minute Portuguese vocabulary test shows how many you already know, and the free Portuguese course starts from the top of the list. Two small sets have pages of their own: numbers 1 to 100 in Portuguese and the days of the week in Portuguese.

How it was counted

• Source. The Brazilian Portuguese list from FrequencyWords, which counts every word in the OpenSubtitles 2018 collection of film and television subtitles.
• Left out: names and untranslated English. People's names (john, jack) and English left in the subtitles (the, you) are taken out before ranking. They are frequent because so many of the films are American, and they are not Portuguese words.
• Added together: old and unaccented spellings. Idéia, the spelling from before the 1990 orthographic agreement, is counted with ideia, and voce with você.
• Meanings. From Verbavia's Portuguese course list, with a few interjections glossed by hand.
• Subtitles are not street recordings. Many of the films were first made in English and translated, so this is Portuguese as it is subtitled. It is still the largest record of everyday dialogue there is.

The same count for English itself is in the 1,000 most common English words.

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
• Verbavia's Portuguese word list, for the meanings. The ranks, rates and running totals are computed by scripts/frequency_thousand.py in Verbavia's repository and printed from its output rather than typed.