Portuguese words used in English, ranked
Portugal built the first global trading empire, five centuries before English became one, and a lot of what it carried home stuck to English on the way through. Some of the words below are simply Portuguese: cobra, marmalade, caipirinha. Others are Portuguese only in the sense that Portuguese ships are how the word reached Europe at all — a Tupi word from Brazil, a Bantu word from Africa, a Sanskrit word by way of Malay and Portuguese India — and English picked it up from Portuguese without ever meeting the original. We ranked 18 of them by how often Brazilian Portuguese, the Portuguese this course teaches, actually says each one, and traced where each one really started.
The words, ranked by how often Brazilian Portuguese says them
The second rank column is where the word falls in our own list of the most common Portuguese words, which runs to 4,525 entries — and for all but four of these words, it does not fall anywhere in it: these are mostly specialised nouns (an animal, a dish, a dance), not the everyday grammar and verbs a frequency-ordered course teaches first.
| Word | Rank in Portuguese speech | Rank in our Portuguese list | In English | In Portuguese |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| palavra | 582 | 600 | a long, needless fuss | simply “word”, from Late Latin parabola; English sailors picked it up as slang for a parley or negotiation, and the sense drifted from “talk” to “too much talk” |
| cobra | 2,861 | 2,722 | the hooded venomous snake | any snake; from Latin colubra. English clipped it from cobra-de-capelo, “hooded snake” |
| feitiço | 3,610 | 4,132 | an object of irrational devotion | a charm or an act of sorcery; English took it from French fétiche, itself from Portuguese feitiço, from Latin facticius, “artificial, made by art” |
| varanda | 5,641 | not in our 4,525 | a roofed porch along a house | Portuguese varanda, “balustrade, balcony”, picked up in Indian English from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal's Indian colonies; Wiktionary calls anything beyond that “unclear and disputed” |
| piranha | 7,871 | not in our 4,525 | the sharp-toothed river fish | from Old Tupi pirãîa, built on pira, “fish”; by way of Portuguese or Spanish — Wiktionary does not commit to which carried it into English first |
| jaguar | 14,237 | not in our 4,525 | the big cat | from Old Tupi îagûara, by way of Portuguese; Brazilian Portuguese more often says onça-pintada |
| zebra | 15,925 | not in our 4,525 | the striped African animal | the word already existed, for a wild ass, before it was applied to the striped animal: Old Galician-Portuguese enzebro/azebra, from Vulgar Latin for Latin equiferus, “wild horse” (equus + ferus). English got it from Italian zebra, not straight from Portuguese |
| samba | 20,388 | not in our 4,525 | the Brazilian dance and music | Wiktionary's Portuguese entry says “probably of Bantu origin, possibly Kongo semba” (“belly-bump”, a dance) — a doublet of semba, not a Portuguese coinage |
| mandarim | 23,185 | not in our 4,525 | a Chinese government official; by extension, any powerful bureaucrat | Portuguese mandarim/mandarij, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrin, “minister, councillor”. The orange is a separate, later sense: Wiktionary derives it from the same root too, “probably... from the yellow colour of the mandarins' costume”, not from any Chinese word for the fruit |
| albino | 26,361 | not in our 4,525 | someone lacking pigmentation | the same word in both languages, from Latin albus, “white”; Portuguese traders used it first for pale-skinned Africans they encountered |
| flamingo | 26,769 | not in our 4,525 | the pink wading bird | Wiktionary credits Portuguese flamengo and Spanish flamenco jointly, both from Catalan flamenc; modern Portuguese now spells the bird flamingo, the same as English |
| marmelada | 29,287 | not in our 4,525 | a bitter citrus preserve | quince jam — marmelada is made from marmelo, “quince”, not citrus |
| tapioca | 31,281 | not in our 4,525 | the starch from cassava root | from Old Tupi tapi’oka, by way of Portuguese |
| melaço | 34,008 | not in our 4,525 | the thick sugar-refining syrup | the same syrup; from Latin mellaceum, “honey-sweet thing”, from mel, “honey” |
| bossa | 48,137 | not in our 4,525 | the 1950s Brazilian music style | bossa, “knack, flair” (literally a bump or protuberance), plus nova, “new” — “new flair”, the Portuguese equal of “new wave” |
| caipirinha | 72,473 | not in our 4,525 | the cachaça cocktail | literally “little hillbilly”: caipira, “country bumpkin”, plus the diminutive -inha |
| pagode | 76,643 | not in our 4,525 | an East Asian tiered temple tower | from Malayalam/Tamil words of respectful address to Hindu gods, ultimately Sanskrit bhagavatī, “Holy One”; Wiktionary notes it was “previously but mistakenly connected” to Persian or Chinese words instead |
| capivara | 88,921 | not in our 4,525 | the giant rodent | from Old Tupi kapi’iûara, literally “grass eater”; English got it via Spanish capibara, which took it from Portuguese capivara |
Only 1 of the 18 is among the thousand most common words of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, and 13 rank below 10,000 — real words, said rarely.
Words that are simply Portuguese
No detour through a third language: these are Portuguese words, or built from Portuguese pieces, that English took more or less as they stood.
- Cobra is "any snake" in Portuguese, from Latin colubra. English narrowed it to the hooded kind by clipping cobra-de-capelo, "hooded snake", down to its first word.
- Marmalade comes from marmelada, which is quince jam — marmelo is "quince" — not citrus. English kept the word and gave it to an entirely different fruit.
- Molasses is from melaço, ultimately Latin mellaceum, "honey-sweet thing", from mel, "honey".
- Caipirinha is literally "little hillbilly": caipira, "country bumpkin", plus the diminutive -inha.
- Palaver started as English sailors' slang, Wiktionary says, "from Portuguese palavra" — which just means "word" (rank 582 in Brazilian Portuguese; not a rare word at all). A simple noun for "talk" drifted, in English, into a noun for too much talk.
- Fetish reached English from French fétiche, which took it from Portuguese feitiço — a charm, or an act of sorcery — from Latin facticius, "artificial, made by art".
- Zebra is older than the striped animal: Old Galician-Portuguese had azebra, a wild ass, from a Latin phrase for "wild horse", long before Portuguese sailors met the striped one in Africa and kept the name. English got the word from Italian, not straight from Portuguese.
- Bossa nova is two Portuguese words: bossa, "knack" or "flair" (literally a bump), and nova, "new" — Brazil's own equivalent of "new wave".
Two more are shared credit rather than solely Portuguese: Wiktionary traces flamingo to Portuguese flamengo and Spanish flamenco jointly (both from Catalan), and albino to Portuguese and Spanish jointly (both from Latin albus, "white"). Modern Portuguese now spells the bird the same way English does, flamingo — the older form behind the etymology, flamengo, is also, confusingly, the Portuguese word for "Flemish".
Words Portuguese carried out of Brazil
Four of these are Tupi-Guarani words that reached English only because Portuguese colonists in Brazil met them first.
- Jaguar, from Old Tupi îagûara.
- Piranha, from Old Tupi pirãîa, built on pira, "fish" — by way of Portuguese or Spanish; Wiktionary does not say which carried it into English first.
- Capybara, from Old Tupi kapi'iûara, literally "grass eater" — by way of Portuguese capivara and then Spanish capibara.
- Tapioca, from Old Tupi tapi'oka.
A fifth came out of Brazil by a different route. Samba is, in Wiktionary's own words, "probably of Bantu origin, possibly Kongo semba" — a dance name meaning "belly-bump" — carried to Brazil with the enslaved people brought there from Central Africa, not a Portuguese coinage at all.
Words Portuguese carried out of Asia — including the word "mandarin" itself
Portugal's other trading empire, in India, Malacca and Macau, carried words into English that have nothing to do with Portugal and nothing to do, surprisingly, with China either.
- Mandarin — the Chinese government official, and by extension any powerful bureaucrat — is Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrin, "minister, councillor". It has no Chinese root at all. The fruit sense is a separate, later coinage from the same word, which Wiktionary says comes "probably... from the yellow colour of the mandarins' costume" — named for the officials' robes, not for any Chinese word for the orange. The language this course calls Mandarin is a difference of English spelling only; its own name for itself, 普通话 Pǔtōnghuà, has nothing to do with this word either. Chinese words used in English is the list of loanwords that really did come from a Chinese language.
- Veranda is Portuguese varanda, "balustrade, balcony" — picked up in Indian English from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal's Indian colonies. Wiktionary calls anything beyond that "unclear and disputed".
- Pagoda traces through Portuguese pagode to Dravidian words of respectful address to Hindu gods, and from there to Sanskrit bhagavatī, "Holy One". Wiktionary notes it was "previously but mistakenly connected" to Persian or Chinese words instead — another word people guess is East Asian and isn't quite.
Why this matters for a learner
Almost none of this is core Portuguese vocabulary: 13 of these 18 words rank below 10,000 in actual Brazilian speech, and only four appear anywhere in our own, free, frequency-ordered Portuguese word list at all. Knowing cobra or jaguar buys a learner nothing that frequency order doesn't already give for free, and the Portuguese course teaches real Brazilian Portuguese in that order — hand-written lessons with the grammar explained in English, reading, listening and writing sections, free on the web and working in any browser, including on a phone. The two-minute Portuguese vocabulary test estimates how many of them you already know, and Brazilian vs European Portuguese covers the split this post's ranking already assumes: Brazilian, not Portugal's own.
The same exercise for two other languages, run two different ways, is in Italian words used in English (ranked by how often English itself says them) and Chinese words used in English (ranked, and tagged by which Chinese language each one actually came from).
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 (Brazilian Portuguese), content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com.
- Wiktionary, English etymology sections, checked 2026-10-09: cobra, marmalade, molasses, caipirinha, palaver, fetish, zebra, bossa nova, flamingo, albino, jaguar, piranha, capybara, tapioca, samba, mandarin, veranda, pagoda. "Cashew" was researched and left off this list: Wiktionary credits English cashew to French acajou, not to Portuguese, so the popular claim that it came via Portuguese does not hold up.
- The word list, every route and every meaning note are written by hand in
scripts/frequency_extras.py(portuguese_loanwords); the ranks and per-million figures are computed byscripts/frequency_curves.pyand printed from its output rather than typed.