Possessive Pronouns: Meu, Teu, Seu, Nosso

Possessives tell us who something belongs to: my phone, your keys, our house. Portuguese has a full set of these words, but they behave in a way that surprises English speakers from the very first sentence. The single most important thing to learn here is this: a Portuguese possessive agrees with the thing being owned, not with the person who owns it. Once that clicks, most of the system falls into place.

The core set

Here is the full grid. Each possessive has four forms because it must match the owned noun in gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural).

So meu, teu, seu, and nosso each have four shapes, and you pick the shape by looking at the noun that follows.

The owner is the same person in both halves — eu (I) — yet the possessive switches from meu to minha. Why? Because carro is masculine and bicicleta is feminine. The possessive copies the noun's gender, never the speaker's.

Why it agrees with the thing, not the owner

This is the deepest point on the page, so it deserves a clear explanation. In English, his and her tell you about the owner's sex: his car means a male owner, her car means a female owner, and the object itself (car) never changes the word. Portuguese works on the opposite principle. The possessive is treated as a kind of adjective, and like every adjective in Portuguese, it must match the noun it describes.

A man and a woman both say minha casa (my house), because casa is feminine. A man and a woman both say meu cachorro (my dog), because cachorro is masculine. The owner's own gender is invisible in the word.

If you have studied Spanish or Italian, this will feel familiar — mi casa, mia casa work the same way (though Spanish only marks number, not gender, on most of them). For an English speaker coming in cold, it is the first habit to rewire.

Plurals: more than one owner, more than one object

Be careful not to confuse two different kinds of "plural":

• Plural of the object changes the possessive ending: meu livro → meus livros.
• Plural of the owner ("our", "their") uses a different word entirely: nosso for "our", and deles / delas for "their".

The "your" forms: você vs. tu

Brazil has two ways to say "you", and they bring two different possessives.

• você is the standard everyday "you" across most of Brazil. Because você historically comes from Vossa Mercê ("Your Grace"), it grammatically behaves like a third person — so its possessive is seu / sua / seus / suas.
• tu survives in the South, parts of the Northeast, and the Amazon region. Its possessive is teu / tua / teus / tuas (regional, informal).

Most of Brazil uses seu / sua for "your", and a learner who only ever uses seu will be understood everywhere. We will treat você and seu as the default throughout this guide.

The big catch: seu also means "his" and "her"

Here is the trap that the rest of these pages will help you climb out of. Because você, ele (he), and ela (she) are all grammatically third person, they all point to seu / sua. That means a sentence like o seu carro can mean your car, his car, or her car — the form alone does not tell you.

Brazilians solve this in everyday speech by using dele (his), dela (her), deles / delas (their) for the third person, and reserving seu / sua for "your". So o carro dele is unambiguously "his car". This is so important that two whole pages are devoted to it — see "The 'Seu' Ambiguity Problem" and "Dele / Dela / Deles / Delas".

Standalone possessives

A possessive can stand on its own without a noun after it, the way English uses mine, yours, ours. The form is identical — you just drop the noun.

There is a small wrinkle here about the article (o meu vs. just meu) and about postposed forms like um amigo meu ("a friend of mine"). Those are covered in "Possessive Pronoun Uses and Patterns".

Common Mistakes

1. Matching the possessive to the owner instead of the object. This is the number-one English-transfer error.

2. Using a masculine possessive with a feminine noun (or vice versa) because of the speaker's gender. A male speaker still says minha casa.

3. Translating "his/her" automatically as seu and creating ambiguity. In conversation, this often gets misread as "your".

4. Confusing "our" (nosso) with the plural of "my" (meus). "Our house" is nossa casa, never minhas casas — pluralizing meu gives you "several things of mine," not "belonging to us."

5. Forgetting that você takes seu, not teu, in standard Brazilian. Mixing them in the same sentence sounds off.

Key Takeaways

• Possessives agree with the owned noun in gender and number, not with the owner. A man says minha casa; a woman says meu carro.
• The four-way forms are meu/minha/meus/minhas, teu/tua/teus/tuas (regional), seu/sua/seus/suas, nosso/nossa/nossos/nossas.
• você → seu; tu → teu (regional). Most of Brazil uses seu for "your".
• seu/sua is ambiguous between "your" and "his/her"; Brazilians resolve this with dele/dela for the third person.