Portuguese Syllable Counter
Count syllables in Portuguese words. Handles oral and nasal diphthongs, silent u after qu/gu, and accented vowels.
Counts Portuguese syllables with nasal and oral diphthongs.
| Word | Syllables | Breakdown |
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Portuguese syllabification rules
Portuguese vowels (a, e, i, o, u) plus accented forms (á, é, í, ó, ú, â, ê, ô) and nasalized variants (ã, õ) all form syllable nuclei. The single most distinctive feature of Portuguese is the inventory of nasal diphthongs — ão (as in pão, cão), õe (pões), ãe (mãe) — each spoken as a single glide and counted as one syllable.
The standard oral diphthongs (ai, ei, oi, ui, au, eu, ou, iu) and triphthongs (uai, uei) also collapse into single nuclei. Two strong vowels meeting form a hiatus and split into separate syllables: sa·ú·de, po·e·ta, ba·ú.
The combinations qu and gu before e or i contain a silent u in most words — queijo (kei-jo, 2 syllables), guerra (ger-ra, 2 syllables) — so the heuristic removes the silent u before counting. (Diaeresis like frequência in old orthography signaled an audible u, but that diacritic was dropped in the 2009 spelling reform.)