Numbers in Portuguese: The Complete Guide

You're standing at a market stall in Rio de Janeiro. The vendor tells you a price. It's three words long, spoken fast, and your brain freezes for a second too long. Numbers are like that. You can read a grammar chart for an hour and still blank out the moment a real Brazilian says "quarenta e três" at full speed.

That's the actual challenge with numbers in Portuguese. It isn't the vocabulary. It's the speed. Prices, phone numbers, ages, street addresses, appointment times: they all demand instant recall, not a slow mental translation while someone waits for your answer. Nobody pauses so you can count on your fingers.

This guide covers everything, from the first ten digits to numbers with nine zeros. You'll get cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, pronunciation, gender agreement, prices, phone numbers, basic math, and the real differences between how Brazil and Portugal count. By the end, you shouldn't need to look any of this up again.

One quick note before we start. Reading a number chart and saying a number out loud under pressure are two different skills, and most learners only ever practice the first one. If you want to build the second, Comigo has you talk out loud from your first lesson instead of reading silently. Keep that in mind as you work through the tables below, and try saying every number out loud as you go, not just scanning it with your eyes.

Numbers 0 to 10 in Portuguese: The Basics

Every Portuguese number builds on these first eleven words. Get them solid and everything after this gets easier, because Portuguese numbers are mostly built like Lego bricks: small pieces combined with "e" (and).

According to Practice Portuguese, Brazilian and European Portuguese share the exact same words for zero through ten, so you only need to learn this table once no matter which accent you're aiming for.

Notice that "um" and "dois" are already doing something the rest of the list doesn't: changing shape based on the gender of the noun they're counting. English numbers never do this, so it's the first thing that trips up most English speakers. We'll break down exactly why in the gender agreement section below.

Worth knowing too: "um" doubles as the word for "a" or "an." "Um livro" can mean either "one book" or "a book," depending on context, and Portuguese speakers rely on tone and situation to tell the two apart. English does something similar with "a," which used to literally mean "one" centuries ago, so the overlap isn't as strange as it first sounds.

Omniglot's Portuguese numbers page lists these same forms side by side with Portugal's slightly different vowel sounds, which is worth a glance if you're training a European Portuguese ear specifically. If you want a second explanation of the basics in plain English, FluentU's number breakdown and Fluent in 3 Months both cover this same first table with audio clips attached. And if you'd rather drill these eleven words with spaced repetition instead of a static list, Clozemaster's Portuguese numbers post has flashcard-style practice built around this exact range.

Numbers 11 to 20: The Teens

The teens are where Portuguese starts throwing a curveball, at least in spelling. Eleven through fifteen are their own separate words, no pattern to lean on. Sixteen through nineteen, though, are built from "dez" (ten) plus the unit you already know, joined with "e," the same connector you'll see everywhere in this language.

That spelling split at 16, 17, and 19 is real, not a typo, and it's one of the clearest black-and-white markers separating the two written standards. Practice Portuguese's guide to European versus Brazilian Portuguese confirms that Brazil writes "dezesseis," "dezessete," and "dezenove," while Portugal writes "dezasseis," "dezassete," and "dezanove," swapping the middle "e" for an "a." Eighteen ("dezoito") is the one number in that run that both sides spell identically, no exceptions.

Fourteen has its own small footnote. Some older textbooks list "quatorze" as an alternate spelling, but "catorze" is the standard form on both sides of the Atlantic today, and it's what you'll see used almost everywhere in modern writing.

If you're already thinking about how you'd spell one of these numbers out loud, letter by letter, over a bad phone line, our guide on how to spell things in Portuguese covers the alphabet you'd need for exactly that situation.

Numbers 20 to 100: Tens and the Compound Formula

Once you hit twenty, Portuguese numbers become predictable. Every multiple of ten from thirty to ninety ends in "-enta," and every compound number in between follows one simple formula: tens, plus "e," plus units.

Twenty is the odd one out. Every other multiple of ten from thirty up ends in "-enta," but twenty is just "vinte," a leftover from Latin that never got folded into that later pattern. Practice Portuguese's breakdown of forming numbers in the tens, hundreds, and thousands walks through exactly why that "-enta" formula holds everywhere except twenty, and why it's not worth trying to force a pattern onto it.

To build any two-digit number that isn't a round ten, take the tens word, add "e," then add the unit. Here's that formula applied to a spread of real numbers:

That "e" never gets dropped, even in fast, casual speech, which is different from English, where we just mash "forty" and "three" together with no connector at all. Rio & Learn's numbers guide and PortuguesePod101's number lesson both drill this exact pattern with audio, which is worth pairing with reading if you want the rhythm to actually stick in your ear rather than just on the page. Street Smart Brazil also points out that Brazilians almost never pause between the tens word and "e" in fast speech, so it tends to come out sounding like one long word: "quarentaetrês."

One more thing to notice in that table: only the units digit can trigger a gender change, and only when that digit is "um" or "dois." "Três," "quatro," and every other digit stay exactly the same no matter what noun they're counting. If you want a printable version of this same 20-to-100 range with a slightly different transliteration style, Omniglot's numbers chart covers it on one page. We'll get concrete about the gender rule itself right now.

Gender Agreement: Why "Um" Becomes "Uma"

Portuguese sorts every noun into one of two genders, masculine or feminine, and that split is baked into the language itself, not something numbers invented on their own. A book ("livro") is masculine. A house ("casa") is feminine. Most masculine nouns end in "-o" and most feminine nouns end in "-a," though there are exceptions you'll pick up naturally with practice and exposure.

Only two numbers actually care about that gender: "um" (one) and "dois" (two). Every other number, from "três" all the way up through the billions, stays exactly the same no matter what it's counting.

That last pair matters more than it looks. Gender agreement doesn't disappear once a number gets folded into a compound. "Vinte e um" becomes "vinte e uma" the moment the noun it's counting turns feminine, even though "vinte" itself never changes shape. Omniglot's Portuguese numbers reference lays out this rule formally, and Rio & Learn's full numbers lesson has more real-world example pairs if you want extra reps beyond this table.

This is the single most common thing English speakers forget, mostly because English numbers never do this at all: "one book" and "one house" use the exact same word "one." Fluent in 3 Months calls this the biggest adjustment for English speakers moving from a genderless number system to one that isn't, and it's worth drilling deliberately rather than hoping it clicks on its own. We'll come back to it in the mistakes table further down, because it's the error that survives longest even in otherwise fluent speakers.

Hundreds: Cem, Cento, and Gender Again

One hundred has two forms in Portuguese, and which one you use depends entirely on what comes right after it. Use "cem" when the number is exactly 100, or when 100 sits directly before a bigger number like a thousand. Use "cento" when 100 is followed by anything smaller, joined with "e."

A few examples make the rule click faster than the definition does:

100 books is "cem livros," because it's exactly 100. 101 is "cento e um," because 100 is followed by something smaller. 100,000 is "cem mil," because 100 sits right before a bigger unit. Linguno's comparison of "cem," "centena," and "cento" breaks this exact split down word by word, and it's worth bookmarking, since most textbooks gloss over it in a single sentence.

From 200 up, hundreds also agree in gender, just like "um" and "dois" do, and unlike "cem" or "cento," which stay completely fixed regardless of what they're counting.

So "duzentos livros" (200 books, masculine) becomes "duzentas casas" (200 houses, feminine), with nothing else in the sentence changing. Elon.io's Brazilian Portuguese cardinal number chart and Practice Portuguese's tens, hundreds, and thousands guide both confirm this pattern holds for every hundred from 200 through 900, with no exceptions once you're past "cem." Rio & Learn's big numbers guide confirms the same pattern holds whether you're counting objects or counting money, which matters once prices get into the hundreds.

Put every piece together and a number like 743 becomes "setecentos e quarenta e três": seven hundred, and forty, and three. Portuguese keeps stacking "e" between every layer, where English just runs the words together with nothing in between.

Hundreds also show up constantly in addresses, and it's worth practicing that specific use case since it comes up the moment you're giving directions to your own home. A house number like 245 on "Rua das Flores" is spoken "Rua das Flores, número duzentos e quarenta e cinco," or more casually, just "duzentos e quarenta e cinco" once the street name is already established in the conversation. Street numbers in Brazil don't usually get split into chunks the way English speakers sometimes split house numbers ("two forty-five"); they're read as one full number, hundreds and all.

Thousands, Millions, and Beyond

Once you're past 999, Portuguese simplifies again. "Mil" (thousand) never changes form, no matter the gender or the size of the number attached to it. "Milhão" (million) does change, though: it becomes "milhões" in the plural, and it behaves more like a regular noun than a number.

Notice "mil" never takes an article the way English "a thousand" sometimes implies one. You just say "mil" for 1,000, not "um mil." "Milhão," on the other hand, needs "um" in front of it, just like a normal noun would, and it needs "de" before whatever it's counting: "um milhão de pessoas" (one million people), not "um milhão pessoas." Rio & Learn's guide to big numbers in Portuguese walks through several worked examples in the hundred-thousands and millions if you want more practice applying the pattern to real figures, like population counts or budget numbers.

Here's the part that catches almost every English speaker off guard: Portuguese and English use opposite punctuation for separating thousands and marking decimals. In English, 1,000.50 uses a comma for the thousands and a period for the decimal. In Portuguese, it's flipped: 1.000,50 uses a period for the thousands and a comma for the decimal. Practice Portuguese's notes on forming larger numbers confirm this reversed punctuation directly, and it's an easy way to misread a price, a population figure, or a salary if you don't know the swap is coming. Worth flagging too: Brazilian "bilhão" lines up with the American English "billion" (a thousand million), not the older British usage of "billion" as a million million, a distinction that becomes relevant if you're translating financial figures and Cambridge's English-Portuguese dictionary is a quick way to double check a specific term.

That same logic carries into how Portuguese handles years, which have their own quirks that go beyond just plain cardinal numbers. We cover that in full detail in a separate post on how to say the year in Portuguese, since years get chunked differently than you'd expect from a straightforward big number, and trying to cram that explanation in here would make this section twice as long as it needs to be.

Ordinal Numbers: First, Second, Third...

Ordinal numbers answer "which one," not "how many": first, second, third, and so on. Like cardinal numbers, they change for gender, but the pattern here is simpler and more consistent: masculine ordinals end in "-o," feminine ordinals end in "-a."

Twentieth is "vigésimo" (or "vigésima"), and from there ordinals keep combining the same way cardinal tens and units do, so thirtieth is "trigésimo," fortieth is "quadragésimo," and so on up the scale. Practice Portuguese's ordinal numbers guide lists the full run well past the hundreds, and Rio & Learn's ordinal numbers lesson adds audio for each one, useful if you want to hear exactly where the stress falls.

Here's something most textbooks skip entirely: in everyday speech, both Brazilians and Portuguese speakers mostly stop using ordinals past "décimo" (tenth). Instead of saying "the fifteenth floor" with an ordinal, people just say "andar quinze," putting the cardinal number after the noun instead. You'll still see ordinals written out in formal contexts, like the names of monarchs or the numbering of centuries, but spoken Portuguese leans on plain cardinals once you're past ten.

There's one more exception worth memorizing, and it trips up learners constantly: dates. Every day of the month uses a plain cardinal number, "dois de maio" (May 2nd), "dez de outubro" (October 10th), except the very first day, which keeps its ordinal form: "primeiro de maio" (May 1st), never "um de maio." Rio & Learn's guide to dates in Portuguese covers this pattern in more depth, including how to string a full date together out loud.

If ordinals come up around birthdays for you, our post on how to say happy birthday in Portuguese has the phrases you'll actually reach for when someone tells you their age or turns a specific year older.

How to Say Phone Numbers Out Loud in Portuguese

Phone numbers in Portuguese aren't read as full multi-digit numbers, the way you might read "duzentos e quarenta" as one chunk. They're read digit by digit, the same way an English speaker reads a phone number one number at a time instead of as "twenty-four sixty-one."

Say you need to give someone the number 98765-4321. You'd read it out as: nove, oito, sete, meia, cinco, quatro, três, dois, um. Did you catch the odd word in there?

Brazilians very often swap "seis" (six) for "meia" when reading digits aloud, especially in phone numbers, ID numbers, and anything read over a noisy line or a bad connection. "Meia" is short for "meia dúzia," literally "half a dozen," which works out to exactly six. It's the same instinct behind an English speaker saying "oh" instead of "zero" on the phone: a shorter, clearer sound that's harder to mishear across static or a bad signal.

You'll hear "meia" used this way constantly in Brazil: on customer service calls, over the radio, in police and military communications, at the pharmacy counter reading back a prescription number. Street Smart Brazil flags this substitution as one of the first quirks that trips up learners who only ever studied numbers from a textbook, since no chart prepares you for a native speaker replacing an entire digit with a different word. It's worth training your ear for it specifically, because if you're listening for "seis" and someone says "meia," you'll miss the six entirely and have to ask them to repeat the whole number.

Phone numbers also carry area codes in both countries, and the formats aren't identical. Wikipedia's entry on telephone numbers in Portugal documents the country's nine-digit mobile format and area-code system, laid out differently from Brazil's structure, where mobile numbers run eight or nine digits with a separate two-digit area code (called a DDD) given in front, often read as its own small chunk before the rest of the number starts. If you're calling a Brazilian number from abroad, that DDD is the part locals expect to hear first, spoken as two separate digits, not as a two-digit number like "twenty-four."

Clozemaster's Portuguese numbers guide specifically recommends drilling phone numbers as practice, because they force you to recall single digits fast, without leaning on the compound-number patterns that make other numbers easier to predict. And PortuguesePod101's number lesson includes sample audio of Brazilians reading full phone numbers at natural speed, "meia" included, which is worth listening to on repeat until it stops sounding strange.

Prices and Money: Talking About Reais

Brazil's currency is the real (plural: reais), written with the symbol R$ placed before the amount. Portugal uses the euro, written with the € symbol, so the currency word itself is one more thing that changes depending on which country you're actually in.

Reading a price out loud follows the same decimal-comma rule covered in the thousands section above. A price tag showing R$19,90 is spoken as "dezenove reais e noventa centavos," or more casually, just "dezenove e noventa" once the context makes "reais" obvious. Notice the comma in "19,90" is doing the job a decimal point does in English, and Brazilians say "vírgula" (comma) if they need to spell a figure out character by character, never "ponto" (period), which is reserved strictly for marking thousands.

That last row shows both rules stacked together: the period marking a thousand, and the whole figure read the Portuguese way, hundreds and tens and units all chained with "e." PortuguesePod101's number lesson includes several priced examples read aloud if you want to hear the natural cadence, and FluentU's number guide has a section built specifically around shopping vocabulary paired with prices, useful if you want more market-style practice beyond a single table.

One real, singular: "um real," not "um reais." The plural "reais" only shows up from two units on, following the exact same logic that governs every other Portuguese noun when it crosses from one to more than one.

Basic Math Out Loud in Portuguese

Simple math sounds almost identical in Portuguese and English, just with different connecting words dropped in between the numbers.

Put a full equation together and it sounds like a short, complete sentence: "dois mais dois é igual a quatro" (two plus two equals four). Here are a few more worked out in full, showing how the answer word shifts once the result is plural.

You'll notice "são" (are) showing up instead of "é" (is) once the answer is a plural number, the same way English flips between "is" and "are" depending on whether the result is one thing or more than one. Elon.io's guide to percentages and math in European Portuguese walks through this same vocabulary from the Portugal side, including how percentages get read aloud, which turns out to be nearly identical to the Brazilian pattern shown here. Practice Portuguese's numbers reference also lists these operation words right alongside the cardinal numbers, handy if you want everything in a single reference instead of jumping between pages.

Common Mistakes English Speakers Make with Portuguese Numbers

Even advanced learners trip over the same handful of number mistakes, usually because English never built the same instincts. Here's what to watch for and how to fix each one.

FluentU's Portuguese numbers article and Clozemaster's number guide both flag gender agreement as the single most common error among their readers, which lines up with what most Portuguese teachers report anecdotally after years of correcting the same slip. The good news is that every mistake on this list gets fixed the same way: by saying the correct version out loud enough times that it stops feeling like a rule and starts feeling automatic.

Brazilian Portuguese vs European Portuguese Numbers

Most Portuguese numbers are identical whether you're in São Paulo or Lisbon. The differences are small but real, and worth knowing if you're planning to spend real time in one country specifically, or if you're learning from mixed sources online without realizing it.

We already covered the teen spelling split earlier, but it's worth repeating here: that "e" versus "a" swap in the middle syllable of 16, 17, and 19 is the clearest black-and-white spelling difference in the entire number system, confirmed directly by Practice Portuguese's European versus Brazilian comparison.

Beyond spelling, the accents themselves diverge in ways that affect how numbers actually sound in real conversation. Elon.io's notes on vowel reduction in European Portuguese note that European Portuguese tends to reduce or drop unstressed vowels, which can make a number like "setenta" come out closer to a clipped "s'tent" in fast European speech, while Brazilian speakers tend to keep every vowel more fully pronounced and evenly spaced. Babbel's piece on the difference between Brazilian and European Portuguese and Middlebury's language schools blog both cover this same rhythm gap across the whole language, not just numbers, useful background if you're deciding which accent to train your ear on before you commit months of practice to one.

Since Comigo teaches Brazilian Portuguese, every pronunciation guide in this post leans Brazilian by default. If you're aiming for a European accent instead, Fluent in 3 Months recommends training with Brazilian audio first anyway, since it's more widely available, then layering the European differences on top once the basics are automatic and you're not thinking about each number individually anymore.

Practice Dialogues: Numbers in Real Conversations

Reading a rule is one thing. Hearing it inside a real exchange is another. Here are two short dialogues built entirely around numbers, the kind you'd actually run into within your first week in Brazil.

Dialogue 1: Giving a phone number

Dialogue 2: Asking a price at a market

Notice the second dialogue leaning on "duas," not "dois," because "mangas" is feminine. That's the gender rule from earlier showing up in a completely ordinary conversation, exactly the kind of exchange you'd have wandering through an open-air market on a Saturday morning. Elon.io's Portugal number grammar section has more example sentences combining prices and math if you want extra reps beyond these two short scenes.

Reading these dialogues silently gets you halfway there. Saying them out loud, at real conversational speed, with the right stress on "meia" and the right gender on "duas," is the part a page can't fully teach you. That's the whole idea behind practicing with Comigo: you say the lines yourself into a microphone, and you find out immediately whether the pronunciation actually landed, instead of assuming it did.

FAQ: Numbers in Portuguese

How do you count to 10 in Portuguese? Zero, um, dois, três, quatro, cinco, seis, sete, oito, nove, dez covers zero through ten, and every one of those words stays exactly the same whether you're in Brazil or Portugal, per Practice Portuguese's number notes.

What is 100 in Portuguese? 100 is "cem" when it stands alone or comes right before a bigger number, and "cento" when it's followed by a smaller number joined with "e," like "cento e cinquenta" (150).

How do you say phone numbers in Portuguese? Read each digit one at a time, not as a full number. Brazilians frequently swap "seis" for "meia" to avoid confusion over the phone, a habit explained earlier in this guide and documented by Street Smart Brazil.

Is "um" masculine or feminine in Portuguese? "Um" is the masculine form, used with masculine nouns like "um carro" (one car). The feminine form is "uma," used with feminine nouns like "uma casa" (one house).

What's the difference between "cem" and "cento"? "Cem" is used alone or right before a bigger number ("cem mil," 100,000). "Cento" is used when 100 is followed by a smaller number, connected with "e" ("cento e dez," 110). Linguno's word comparison covers every edge case if you want more examples than fit here.

How do you say big numbers like a million in Portuguese? "Um milhão" for one million, "dois milhões" for two million, always plural "milhões" from two on. "Mil" (thousand) never changes form no matter how large the number gets, a pattern Rio & Learn's big numbers guide covers with several full worked examples.

Do Portuguese numbers change for gender? Only "um/uma," "dois/duas," and the hundreds from 200 up ("duzentos/duzentas" and so on) change for gender. Everything else, including "três" through "noventa e nove," stays fixed no matter what it's counting.

What's the difference between Brazilian and European Portuguese numbers? Mostly spelling: Brazil writes "dezesseis," "dezessete," and "dezenove," while Portugal writes "dezasseis," "dezassete," and "dezanove." Pronunciation drifts too, with European Portuguese dropping more unstressed vowels, as Middlebury's blog on the two dialects explains in more depth.

How do you write prices in Portuguese? With a comma for the decimal and a period for thousands, the reverse of English: R$1.250,90 means one thousand two hundred fifty reais and ninety centavos, and the comma gets spoken as "vírgula."

Where can you hear these numbers actually pronounced? Omniglot's numbers page and Rio & Learn's numbers lesson both include recordings for every number covered in this guide, useful for training your ear alongside the tables here.

What does the Portuguese word for "number" actually mean? "Número" works almost exactly like the English word "number," covering everything from a house number to a phone number to a math figure. Cambridge's English-Portuguese dictionary entry has the full range of translations and example sentences if you want to see it used in other contexts.

From Number Charts to Real Conversations

You now have every number rule this post promised: zero through the billions, ordinals, gender agreement, prices, phone numbers, math, and the real gap between Brazil and Portugal. That's more ground than any single chart usually covers in one place, and it's worth the effort, since Portuguese is one of the most widely spoken languages on earth according to Wikipedia's overview of the language, used across several continents by hundreds of millions of people, so this vocabulary carries well beyond just Brazil.

But a table only gets you halfway there. The real test is producing a number instantly, out loud, the moment a vendor names a price or a friend asks your age. That's a different skill from simply recognizing "quarenta e três" on a page. It's the same gap that shows up with telling time in Portuguese, where the numbers themselves are simple but the speed of real conversation isn't, and it's part of why Portuguese has a reputation for being tricky to learn, even though the grammar rules here aren't especially hard once you see them written out clearly.

The fix isn't more charts. It's more speaking. Every time you say a number out loud, even a wrong one, you're building the exact recall you'll need at a market stall or on a phone call where nobody waits for you to think it through. Numbers tend to show up early in conversation too, often right after you ask how someone's doing, so they're worth getting comfortable with sooner rather than later.

That's the entire idea behind Comigo: you talk out loud from your very first lesson instead of just reading silently, and you find out immediately whether your pronunciation landed. If you've made it this far through a guide this long, you clearly want to actually use this stuff out loud. Go say some numbers.