Levar (To Take/Carry) — Full Conjugation

Levar is one of the most productive verbs in everyday Portuguese: you levas the rubbish out, you levas a friend to the airport, a trip leva three hours, and if you're unlucky you levas com a door in the face. The literal sense is to take / to carry something from one place to another — always with a direction away from the speaker's current location. That direction matters, because Portuguese rigorously distinguishes levar from trazer (to bring — movement towards the speaker), a distinction that English, with its single lax take/bring, systematically blurs.

Beyond the literal meaning, levar enters a huge family of idioms: levar a sério (take seriously), levar a mal (take badly), levar tempo (take time), levar uma vida (live a life). These are not optional decoration — they are part of basic fluency. This page gives you every conjugated form of levar (a completely regular -ar verb) and then walks you through its literal, directional, temporal, and idiomatic uses.

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Present indicative — presente do indicativo

Imperfect indicative — pretérito imperfeito

Preterite indicative — pretérito perfeito simples

Note: European Portuguese distinguishes the 1st-person plural present levamos from the preterite levámos by the acute accent. Brazilian Portuguese writes both without the accent.

Pluperfect indicative, simple — pretérito mais-que-perfeito simples

Pluperfect indicative, compound — pretérito mais-que-perfeito composto

Present perfect — pretérito perfeito composto

Simple future — futuro do indicativo simples

Future perfect — futuro perfeito

Conditional — condicional

Conditional perfect — condicional composto

Present subjunctive — presente do conjuntivo

Imperfect subjunctive — imperfeito do conjuntivo

Future subjunctive — futuro do conjuntivo

Present perfect subjunctive — pretérito perfeito do conjuntivo

Pluperfect subjunctive — pretérito mais-que-perfeito do conjuntivo

Future perfect subjunctive — futuro perfeito do conjuntivo

Imperative — imperativo

Affirmative:

Negative:

Personal infinitive — infinitivo pessoal

Compound personal infinitive — infinitivo pessoal composto

Levar vs trazer: the directional rule

Portuguese does in two verbs what English muddles in one. The rule:

• levar = to move something from here (where the speaker is) to there (somewhere else).
• trazer = to move something from there (somewhere else) to here (where the speaker is).

This is a deictic distinction — it is anchored in the speaker's location at the moment of speaking. If you are at home and your friend is at a restaurant, and you ask your friend to return with wine, you say Trazes vinho? ("will you bring wine [here to me]?") not Levas vinho? ("will you take wine [somewhere away from both of us]?").

If you are at the restaurant and you want your friend to come and deliver wine that is at your home, the perspective flips: from your current location at the restaurant, the wine moves away from its starting point (home). So you might say Podes passar em casa e trazer vinho? — because from the restaurant's perspective the final destination (the restaurant) is here.

Common uses and idioms

Temporal: levar tempo — "to take (an amount of) time." The subject is the activity or object; the object is the duration.

Levar + "it" (idiomatic): receive a beating / bad experience

levar a sério / levar a mal / levar a bem — to take seriously / to take badly / to take in good part.

levar uma vida (+ adjective) — to live a [kind of] life.

levar a + infinitive — to lead (someone/something) to do (more literary / causal).

Other common patterns:

• levar a cabo — to carry out (a project, investigation).
• levar a melhor / a pior — to come out on top / to come out worst.
• levar com alguém — to put up with someone difficult.
• levar por diante — to press on with, to push through.

Example sentences in context

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• Levar is a fully regular -ar verb. No stem changes, no spelling changes, no irregular participle.
• The core meaning is to carry / take something away from here. It pairs with trazer (to bring toward here) in a strict deictic system.
• Levar tempo is the standard way to express "take (an amount of) time" in Portuguese. Do not translate take as tomar in this context.
• Levar accepts a huge range of idioms — levar a sério, levar a mal, levar uma vida, levar com, levar a cabo. Learn them as chunks.
• 1st-person plural preterite levámos carries an acute accent in European Portuguese to distinguish it from the present levamos.
• The directional rule is not optional: replacing levar with trazer (or vice versa) changes the meaning, sometimes nonsensically. Native listeners notice immediately.