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P o r t u g u e s e O n l i n e

>>Adjectives >  Regular Adjectives > Using Adjectives with Articles

As in English, adjectives are never placed before the Portuguese articles (the words a, an, the).

O menino alto the tall boy or the less common o alto menino the TALL boy are the two ways to directly describe the noun menino with the adjective alto. Alto o menino is not acceptable, although you will see that word order in a phrase like é alto o menino the boy is tall (literally is tall the boy; o menino é alto is also perfectly acceptable). In those cases, the word is not directly describing the noun, it is being linked by a verb (ser to be). The same rules apply to the indefinite article (a or an), visible in the phrases um menino alto a tall boy and the less common um alto menino a TALL boy.

Portuguese adjectives are sometimes found alone with the articles. The meaning of these constructions is fairly transparent, but the grammatical structure is slightly different than English. Portuguese speakers do not have a noun to fall back on in these phrases. For example, used alone, o alto means the tall one. and um alto means a tall one. When the noun described is already known to be feminine from context, a contente means the happy one and uma contente means a happy one.