Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "o outono" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

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

o outono is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /u oˈto.nu/. It means “autumn / fall.” oo oh-TOH-noo. The "ou" at the front is a plain "oh" with no "oo" after it.

oo oh-TOH-noo. The "ou" at the front is a plain "oh" with no "oo" after it.

o outono /u oˈto.nu/

Say it oh-TOH-noo, with the middle syllable loudest. The word contains three o-spellings producing three different values: a flattened diphthong, a stressed closed vowel, and a raised final one. Portuguese writes all three the same way and expects you to know the difference.

Listen: o outono

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Sound it out

ou Brazilian Portuguese collapses this spelling into a single closed "oh." It was a real diphthong centuries ago and the writing preserves the history, but sounding both letters now reads as archaic.

to A firm dental t and a closed "oh" carrying the stress. No palatalization, since an o follows rather than an i.

no An n opening its own syllable — nasalizing nothing — and the final vowel rounds up to "oo." So the word runs "oh, oh, oo" across three syllables.

Hear it in a sentence

No outono o tempo fica mais fresco.

In autumn the weather gets cooler.

Listen: No outono o tempo fica mais fresco.

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"No outono o tempo fica mais fresco" strings three vowel-heavy words together — "no outono o" — which Brazilians glide straight through. "Tempo" carries a nasal, and "fresco" has a syllable-final s that stays a hiss for most speakers.

Where English speakers slip

Pronouncing "ou" as "oo" gives "oo-TOH-noo," which gets the first vowel wrong. English speakers also leave the last o unraised, producing the opposite mistake at the other end. And in Brazil the season runs March to June, which is worth knowing before you use the word in conversation.