Pretérito Perfeito of Pôr

Pôr (to put, to place) is arguably the most morphologically irregular verb in Brazilian Portuguese. Its preterite stem — pus- / pôs- — looks completely unrelated to the infinitive, and there is no way to predict it. The payoff is that pôr is the parent of a whole family of common verbs (compor, supor, propor, dispor, opor…), and they all inherit the exact same preterite. Learn the irregularity once and you unlock the entire family.

The paradigm

The diacritics matter — pus, pôs, pôr

Three of these words look alike but mean different things, and the accents are the only thing keeping them apart in writing:

• pôr (with circumflex) — the infinitive, "to put." The accent exists precisely to distinguish it from the preposition por ("by, for, through"), which has no accent.
• pôs (with circumflex) — "he/she put," the third-person preterite.
• pus — "I put," the first-person preterite. No accent.

Why the stem is "pus-" — a note on honesty

There is no clean phonological story that turns pôr into pus the way falar turns into falei. The form descends from Latin posui, and Portuguese simply inherited the broken-looking result. Strictly speaking this is stem suppletion: the preterite stem comes from a historically different shape of the verb than the infinitive, so the two no longer resemble each other. The practical consequence is blunt — you cannot derive these forms, so you memorize pôr → pus, pôs, pusemos, puseram as a single fixed unit, the same way an English speaker memorizes "go → went."

It also helps to notice that pôr is the only modern Portuguese verb whose infinitive does not end in -ar, -er, or -ir. It is a historical leftover (it used to be poer), and that oddness in the infinitive is your clue that the rest of the paradigm will not behave normally either. Treat the strangeness of the infinitive as a warning label.

The compounds inherit everything

Every verb that ends in -por is built on pôr and conjugates identically — just keep the prefix attached. There are no surprises once you know the parent.

Note that the third-person forms of the compounds keep the circumflex too: compôs, propôs, dispôs — same logic as the parent pôs.

A note on register and frequency

In everyday Brazilian speech, pôr itself is often replaced by colocar ("to put, to place"), which is fully regular: coloquei, colocou, colocamos, colocaram. You'll hear Coloquei o livro na mesa at least as often as Pus o livro na mesa. Both are correct; pôr sounds slightly more compact and is fully standard, while colocar is the safe everyday default. (Colocar, by the way, is one of the spelling-change verbs: its eu preterite is coloquei, with c → qu.)

The compounds (compor, propor, supor, dispor, opor), however, have no easy substitute and are common in writing and formal speech — there is no casual one-word replacement for propor or compor the way colocar covers pôr. So while you can dodge bare pôr in conversation, you genuinely need the compound preterites to read a newspaper or follow a meeting. That's the real reason to invest in the pus- stem: you're not learning one verb, you're learning six at once.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• pôr: pus, puseste (regional), pôs, pusemos, puseram.
• The stem pus- is suppletive — it does not resemble the infinitive. Memorize it as a block, like "go/went."
• Watch the accents: pôr (infinitive) vs pôs (he put) vs pus (I put); the preposition por has no accent at all.
• All -por compounds (compor, supor, propor, dispor, opor) follow the same pattern, keeping the prefix and the circumflex on the third-person singular.
• In casual speech, colocar is a fully regular everyday substitute for pôr on its own.