BR Alphabet

The Brazilian Portuguese alphabet looks identical to the English one — the same 26 Latin letters — but two things differ that matter in daily life: the names of the letters (which you need when you spell a name or an email address out loud over the phone), and the role of digraphs and ç, which are written with familiar letters but behave specially. This page gives you the full inventory, the spoken names, and the special cases.

26 letters since 2009

For most of the 20th century the official Portuguese alphabet had 23 letters: K, W and Y were considered foreign and kept out. The Acordo Ortográfico de 1990 — in force in Brazil since 2009 — formally readmitted K, W and Y, bringing the count to 26, identical to English. They are used for:

• foreign proper names: Kevin, William, Yasmin, Darwin, Newton;
• units and symbols of international use: km (quilômetro), kg (quilograma), W (watt), Y as a variable;
• derivatives of foreign names: darwinismo, byroniano.

The letters and their names

When you spell aloud — dictating a surname, a license plate, an email — you use the letter names, and several of them surprise English speakers. The names are grammatically masculine (o agá, o xis).

The ones to drill: H = agá (not "aitch"), J = jota, K = cá, W = dáblio, X = xis, Y = ípsilon. These are the letters whose names you cannot guess from English.

Digraphs: two letters, one sound

A digraph (dígrafo) is a pair of letters that together spell a single sound. They are not separate letters of the alphabet — you will not find them in the table above — but they are essential to know because the two letters do not "add up" the way you'd expect. The main ones:

The English contrast worth flagging: English ch is usually [tʃ] (as in church), but Portuguese ch is [ʃ] (as in machine). And lh/nh — the palatal consonants of filho and banho — have no everyday English equivalent at all; the closest is the ll of "million" and the ny of "canyon."

Why the silent 'u' matters in qu/gu

In qu and gu, the u is normally silent before e and i, serving only to keep the [k]/[g] sound hard:

When the u is pronounced before e/i (as in aguentar, tranquilo, linguiça), it is simply written and read — there is no longer a trema to mark it, since the 2009 reform abolished the trema. Before the reform these were agüentar, tranqüilo, lingüiça; the dots are gone now.

'Ç' is not a letter — it's c + cedilha

A point that confuses learners: ç does not appear in the alphabet, and it is never counted as a 27th letter. It is the letter C carrying the cedilha diacritic. In a dictionary, caça is alphabetized as if it were spelled with a plain c. When spelling aloud, you say "cê cedilha" (or "cê com cedilha").

Likewise, ç never starts a word in Portuguese, and it is only used before a, o, u — full details are on the cedilha page. The same logic applies to accented vowels (á, ã, ô, é…): they are not extra letters but the base vowel carrying a mark, and they sort alphabetically with the plain vowel.

Spelling things aloud: practical phrases

The verb for "to spell" is soletrar. "Letter" is letra; "uppercase" is maiúscula, "lowercase" is minúscula; "accent" is acento; "hyphen/dash" is traço or hífen.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• The alphabet has 26 letters — K, W, Y were readmitted by the 2009 reform for foreign words, units and symbols.
• The letter names matter for spelling aloud; learn the tricky ones: agá (H), jota (J), cá (K), dáblio (W), xis (X), ípsilon (Y).
• Digraphs (ch, lh, nh, rr, ss, qu, gu, sc) are letter-pairs spelling a single sound; they are not alphabet letters.
• Portuguese ch = [ʃ] (sh), unlike English ch = [tʃ]; lh/nh are palatal sounds English lacks.
• Ç is not a letter — it is c
  • cedilha, never word-initial, and sorts with plain c.