Portuguese (Brazil) · Pronunciation Guide

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

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

o rio is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /u ˈhi.u/. It means “river.” oo HEE-oo. A throaty h at the front, and two syllables rather than one.

oo HEE-oo. A throaty h at the front, and two syllables rather than one.

o rio /u ˈhi.u/

Loud on the first syllable, with the two vowels in hiatus. The word is the same one in the city's name, which makes it unusually useful: get "rio" right and you have both the common noun and the pronunciation that most identifies a visitor to Rio de Janeiro.

Listen: o rio

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Sound it out

r Word-initial r in Brazil is friction from the back of the throat, close to a pushed English h. This is why the city of Rio sounds like "HEE-oo" to a first-time visitor expecting something else entirely.

i A tense high "ee" carrying the stress, arriving straight out of the throat friction. It stands as its own complete syllable.

o A final unstressed vowel heard as "oo," taking its own beat. It doesn't merge with the i, because Portuguese builds diphthongs around an unstressed i or u and here the i is the stressed one.

Hear it in a sentence

O rio é bem largo aqui.

The river is very wide here.

Listen: O rio é bem largo aqui.

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"O rio é bem largo aqui" uses "bem" as an intensifier meaning quite, extremely common in Brazil. "Largo" has a syllable-final r rendered as a rasp — so the sentence contains a guttural h and a breathy rasp, both written with the same letter.

Where English speakers slip

Trilling the r is the Spanish error and curling it is the English one; Brazilians make it an h. Squashing the word into one syllable — "HREE-oo" as a single glide — is the second problem. And note that "rio" is also the verb form meaning I laugh, distinguished only by context.