Portuguese Word Stress and Accent Marks

If you care about Portuguese pronunciation and want to get good at it, you’ll need to come to grips with its word stress patterns. That’s it.

Here’s the Portuguese word stress in a nutshell: 

Portuguese words without accent marks are stressed on the last or next-to-last syllable according to a few spelling patterns.  Otherwise, words are marked with an accent mark to indicate where word stress falls (either on the last, next-to-last, or third-from-last syllable). 

Like English, Portuguese is a stress-timed language (as opposed to syllable-stressed languages). In stress-timed languages, time intervals between stressed syllables are fairly consistent. This leads to the shortening and reduction of unstressed syllables so that they can fit into relatively fixed time intervals set by stressed ones. 

As a result, unstressed syllables are pronounced less clearly, whereas stressed syllables stand out. Thus, word stress in Portuguese is conspicuous and you can clearly hear it. Read on.

Related Video Lessons

1. By default – without accent marks

Without any accent mark, Portuguese words are normally stressed on either the next-to-last syllable or the last syllable. Let’s take a closer look at it. 

Word stress on the next-to-last syllable

Most commonly, Portuguese words are stressed on the next-to-last syllable. Here are a few examples:

• momento > mo-men-to (moment)
• peludo > pe-lu-do (hairy)
• vezes > ve-zes (times)
• diabo > di-a-bo (devil)
• bastante> bas-tan-te (quite)
• Carlos > Car-los (Carlos)
• carente > ca-ren-te (needy)
• . . .

Word stress on the last syllable

However, words ending in certain consonants, vowels, and diphthongs are stressed on the last one. Let’s look at the different subgroups of this category. 

Words ending in -r, -l or -z

Words ending with the consonants -r, -l or -z are stressed on the last syllable:

• falar > fa-lar (talk)
• beber > be-ber (drink)
• anel > a-nel (ring)
• tamboril > tam-bo-ril (monkfish)
• rapaz > ra-paz (boy)
• capuz > capuz (hood)
• . . .

Words ending in -i or -u