Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "bravo" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

Q: How do you pronounce bravo in Portuguese (Brazil)?

bravo is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈbɾa.vu/. It means “angry.” BRAH-voo. A tapped r right after the b, and the final o comes out as "oo."

BRAH-voo. A tapped r right after the b, and the final o comes out as "oo."

bravo /ˈbɾa.vu/

The ordinary rule lands on the first syllable. The adjective agrees, so a woman is "brava," with the accent staying exactly where it was — Portuguese gender endings almost never move a word's stress, which makes the pattern predictable once you've seen it.

Listen: bravo

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Sound it out

br A b with a tap flicked straight after. Keep them glued together — English speakers let a small vowel leak in, and Spanish speakers roll the r too hard.

a Wide open, jaw down, and stressed. It's the longest sound in the word and carries all the emphasis, which suits a word that usually gets said with feeling.

vo A real v with teeth on lip, then "oo" to finish. The word ends quietly after its loud opening.

Hear it in a sentence

Ele está bravo comigo.

He is angry with me.

Listen: Ele está bravo comigo.

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"Ele está bravo comigo" uses "comigo," the fused preposition-pronoun Portuguese requires instead of "com mim." In speech "está" clips to "tá," so the sentence compresses to about four spoken beats.

Where English speakers slip

Breaking the br cluster and leaving the final o unraised are the two phonetic slips. The semantic one is bigger: in Brazilian Portuguese "bravo" means angry, not brave — the English word is a false friend, and "corajoso" is what you want for courage. "Bravo!" as applause is a separate Italian borrowing.