Portuguese dictionary

Portuguese is a Romance language. The Portuguese language is made up of more than 240 Million speakers and thus is the sixth most spoken language in the world. During the so-called Age Of Exploration, Portuguese sailors spread the language in many parts of the world, which also explains the considerable number of speakers. Portugal was a colonial power in the 15th and 16th Century and occupied many territories in South America, as well as in Asia and Africa. In different countries of those continents, Portuguese is still an official language – beside Portugal, of course. (Brasil, Angola, Mozambique).

As in many other languages, one can find various dialects, that are spread all over the different parts of the world in which Portuguese is spoken – they are called sotaque. They often vary strongly from one another, depending on which country the dialects occur. Mostly the differences distinguishing the dialects are of lexical and grammatical nature.

Portuguese has been influenced by many other languages and its system of sounds is quite similar to the ones of French or Catalan. However, grammar, structure and vocabulary of Portuguese and Spanish are very similar. Both languages are descendants of Latin and one can recognise such a relation by simply looking at all the lexical items. Other than that there are influences an borrowings from many other languages like Germanic, Arabic or Asian languages.

There are 23 letters in the Portuguese alphabet. Some of them, like k, w and y are only used with proper names. Diacritics can appear with the following letters.: Á, Â, Ã, À, Ç, É, Ê, Í, Ó, Ô, Õ, Ú, Ü.

With the help of Lingi, you can translate any word from Portuguese to English or vice versa. You can use it for free and it's easy as abc.