Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

dois is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈdojs/. It means “two.” DOYSS — one syllable, rhyming with "voice." The d stays hard because there's no i-sound right after it.

DOYSS — one syllable, rhyming with "voice." The d stays hard because there's no i-sound right after it.

dois /ˈdojs/

A single syllable takes the stress automatically. What's worth noting is that "dois" is the masculine form — counting two feminine things requires "duas," which is a genuinely different word with two syllables and different stress placement. Portuguese is one of the few Romance languages that still genders the number two.

Listen: dois

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Sound it out

d A dental d with the tongue against the back of the upper teeth, and crucially it is not palatalized here: the vowel following is an o, so no "dj." Compare "dia," where the i triggers the change.

oi A closed "oh" gliding into a y, giving the vowel of "boy." Both letters belong to one syllable — resist any urge to break them apart.

s A clean hissed s closing the word. Most of Brazil keeps it that way; Rio speakers turn syllable-final s into "sh," so you may hear "doysh" from a carioca.

Hear it in a sentence

Tenho dois irmãos.

I have two brothers.

Listen: Tenho dois irmãos.

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"Tenho dois irmãos" places the number before a noun that ends in the nasal diphthong -ãos, and the linking matters: the s of "dois" runs into the vowel starting "irmãos" and softens into a z sound, giving "doy-zeer-MOWNSH." That s-to-z shift across word boundaries is automatic in Portuguese whenever a vowel follows.

Where English speakers slip

Learners routinely say "doh-EES," two syllables, because the vowel letters look separable. It's one beat. The other trap is gender: using "dois" with a feminine noun is a grammatical error Brazilians notice immediately, so "duas horas" and "dois dias" are worth drilling as a pair from the start.