Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

dez is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈdɛs/. It means “ten.” DESS, rhyming with English "dress." The z at the end is pronounced as an s.

DESS, rhyming with English "dress." The z at the end is pronounced as an s.

dez /ˈdɛs/

A monosyllable takes stress automatically, and Portuguese writes no accent on it because there's no ambiguity to resolve. That said, the open vowel quality is unmarked and simply has to be learned — nothing in the spelling "dez" tells you the e is open rather than closed.

Listen: dez

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Sound it out

d A dental d, tongue on the back of the upper teeth. It stays hard because the vowel is an open e, not an i — this is a useful contrast with "dia," where the same letter becomes "dj."

e Wide open, the vowel of "bed." Portuguese distinguishes this from the closed e of "três," and using the wrong one here makes the number hard to catch.

z At the end of a word, z is devoiced to a plain s sound. It only comes back to a true z when the next word begins with a vowel, as in "dez anos," pronounced "deh-ZAH-noos."

Hear it in a sentence

Espere dez minutos.

Wait ten minutes.

Listen: Espere dez minutos.

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"Espere dez minutos" starts with a verb whose initial e raises toward i — "iss-PEH-ree" — and ends with a plural whose final s stays a clean hiss. In the middle, the z of "dez" meets the m of "minutos" and stays an s, since the following sound is a consonant, not a vowel.

Where English speakers slip

Almost everyone voices the final z, producing "dezz" with a buzz. In isolation and before consonants it's an unvoiced "dess." The vowel is the other trap: English speakers who know Spanish "diez" tend to slip a y-glide in front, giving "dyess," but Portuguese has no glide there at all.