The Portuguese lexicon — an overview

The lexicon is the set of words of a language — its vocabulary seen as a whole. Unlike phonology or grammar, which rest on a closed number of units and rules, the lexicon is an open class: it gains and loses words continually, at the mercy of history, technology and fashion. To know the Portuguese lexicon is therefore to know, in miniature, the history of the people who spoke it. This section sets out where the words come from, how new ones are formed, and how that store is measured and recorded; the present article serves as a map.

A Latin core and successive layers

The overwhelming majority of the most frequent Portuguese words are inherited: they came directly from Vulgar Latin by unbroken oral transmission, undergoing the language’s characteristic sound changes. These are the everyday verbs, pronouns, prepositions and nouns — ser (to be), ter (to have), casa (house), água (water), mão (hand), pão (bread) — that carry almost all ordinary speech.

Onto that core were deposited layers of loanwords, each a witness to a historical contact:

Layer	Source	Examples
Substrate and superstrate	pre-Roman, Germanic	barro (clay), esquerda (left); guerra (war), branco (white)
Arabisms	Arabic (8th–13th c.)	açúcar (sugar), azeite (olive oil), alface (lettuce), oxalá (hopefully)
Learned words	scholarly Latin and Greek	capítulo (chapter), fotografia, democracia
Gallicisms	French	chefe (boss), garagem, restaurante
Anglicisms	English	futebol (football), líder (leader), software

A particularly telling case are the doublets: pairs in which one and the same Latin word yielded a popular form, worn down by use, and a learned one, reintroduced later from written Latin.

How many words does Portuguese have?

The question has no single answer, because it depends on what one counts. The great reference dictionaries record impressive orders of magnitude: the Dicionário Houaiss gathers more than two hundred thousand entries, taking in current, technical, regional and historical terms together. The more selective Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa Contemporânea of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences stops at some tens of thousands.

That total contrasts sharply with the vocabulary of any single speaker. An educated adult recognises tens of thousands of words (their passive lexicon) but actively uses a fraction of them. And in practice a handful of very frequent words — nearly all inherited — suffices for most of any text: word frequency falls off very steeply, so that the first few hundred words already cover the majority of occurrences.

How the lexicon grows

More important than borrowing is the language’s capacity to generate words from itself. The two central mechanisms are derivation — adding prefixes and suffixes to a base — and compounding — joining two roots. From a single root, a whole family is born:

Portuguese’s evaluative suffixes — above all the diminutives (-inho) and augmentatives (-ão) — are especially productive and carry affective shades that are hard to translate, from tenderness (cafezinho, ‘a nice little coffee’) to irony.

How to read this section

For the origin of the words and the weight of each stratum, begin with The origin of the vocabulary; then move on to the articles on Arabisms and on Gallicisms and Anglicisms. To see how new words are made, read Word formation and Prefixes and suffixes. The lexicon also has zones deeply bound to culture — idioms, false friends and the word saudade — and tools for studying it, treated in Dictionaries and corpora.