Territory 07
Lexicon
The words: Latin roots, Arabic borrowings, and the famous saudade.
01 · Where to begin
Where to begin
Three entry points that build context before you go deeper.
Reference
The Portuguese lexicon — an overview
A map of the Portuguese vocabulary: its core inherited from Latin, the layers of loanwords that enriched it and the processes that make it grow — and a sense of its true size.
Reference
The Origin of the Vocabulary
Portuguese is, in essence, Latin transformed by time. Onto that inherited core successive layers were laid — pre-Roman, Germanic, Arabic and modern.
Reference
Arabisms
Words of Arabic origin form the second layer of the Portuguese lexicon after Latin — from alface to açúcar, from alfândega to álgebra. How they entered, how they adapted and where they cluster.
02 · Explore every article
Explore every article
13 Portuguese–English article pairs
Germanic and Asian Contributions
Two distant layers of the Portuguese vocabulary: the Germanic words brought by the Sueves and Visigoths, and the Asian words gathered across the seas during the maritime expansion.
Tupi and African Loanwords
How the Indigenous languages of the Americas and the languages of Africa shaped Portuguese vocabulary, from tropical flora and fauna to the words of music, cooking and religion.
Gallicisms and Anglicisms
Portuguese borrowings from French and English, from the monks of Cluny and nineteenth-century fashion to sport and the digital age, and how the language adapts them.
Word formation
How Portuguese builds new words from the ones it already has — chiefly by derivation (affixes) and compounding (joining bases) — the two great mechanisms that renew the lexicon.
Prefixes and Suffixes
Portuguese's productive affixes — prefixes of Latin and Greek origin and the suffixes that build nouns, adjectives and verbs — and the meaning each one adds to a base.
Diminutives and augmentatives
The suffixes -inho/-zinho and -ão do far more than measure size: they grade affection, politeness, irony and contempt. A central chapter in the pragmatics of Portuguese.
Idioms and proverbs
The figurative layer of the language — sayings, set phrases and proverbs in which history, the sea, farming and faith have left their mark on European Portuguese.
False friends
Words that look alike but do not mean the same — within Portuguese itself, between Portuguese and Spanish, and between Portuguese and English.
Saudade
The most celebrated and most mythologised Portuguese word — its etymology, what it actually names, the grammar that governs it, and the long history of the claim that it is untranslatable.
Dictionaries and corpora
From Bluteau and Morais Silva to the Common Orthographic Vocabulary and the great electronic corpora: how the Portuguese lexicon is recorded, standardised and observed.