“I Love You” in Portuguese (+ 50 More Romantic Phrases)
Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?
Saying “I love you” in Portuguese is a special thing to me – not least because it’s the language in which I said my wedding vows.
If you plan on travelling to a Portuguese-speaking country, you might well meet someone worth learning the language for. A good place to start is finding a language exchange partner, which is how plenty of these stories begin. Or maybe you’ve already found a Portuguese-speaking lover! Either way, it’s worth knowing all the words and expressions below, so you’re never stuck for how to say “I love you” in Portuguese.
Table of contents
- “Love” in Portuguese
- “To love” in Portuguese
- “I love you” in Portuguese
- “Beautiful” in Portuguese
- “Cute” in Portuguese
- “I miss you” in Portuguese
- “Heart” in Portuguese
- “Sweetheart” in Portuguese
- “Boyfriend/girlfriend” in Portuguese
- “Fiancé/fiancée” in Portuguese
- “Husband/wife” in Portuguese
- “Love” in Portuguese is a Beautiful Thing
“Love” in Portuguese
“Love” in Portuguese is amor, a masculine noun. It’s a cousin of English words like “amorous”.
To the object of your affection, you could say: você é o amor da minha vida – “you are the love of my life.”
You might send messages com amor (with love), or tell someone they’re your amor verdadeiro – “true love”. “To make love” is fazer amor.
So maybe tomorrow morning you can greet your Portuguese-speaking lover with bom dia, meu amor – “Good morning, my love” in Portuguese.
“To love” in Portuguese
We’ve covered the noun “love”. The verb “to love” in Portuguese is amar, and it conjugates like this:
- eu amo – “I love”
- tu amas – “you love” (informal in Portugal; across southern Brazil, much of the north-east and around Belém, you'll usually hear tu ama)
- você ama – “you love” (widely used in Brazil; in Portugal, its register and acceptability depend on context)
- ele/ela ama – “he/she loves”
- nós amamos – “we love”
- vocês amam – “you (plural) love”
- eles/elas amam – “they love”
For the sake of completeness, it’s also worth knowing vós amais, “you (pl.) love”. It is uncommon in most everyday speech, but survives in parts of northern Portugal and in religious or literary contexts.
With amar under our belts, we can learn this essential phrase:
“I love you” in Portuguese
To say “I love you” in Brazilian Portuguese, say eu te amo. Or better yet, drop the eu, as it’s optional: te amo.
European and Brazilian Portuguese often place object pronouns differently. In this affirmative sentence, Brazilian Portuguese normally uses te amo, while European Portuguese normally uses amo-te.
To say “I love you too” in Portuguese, i.e. in response to a te amo or amo-te, you can say te amo/amo-te também, or simply eu também.
Or maybe you want to make things sound more intense. Te amo muito means “I love you a lot”.
Te amo muitíssimo is even more emphatic. It’s a great way to say something like “I love you so much” in Portuguese.
To say “I’m in love with you” in Portuguese, say estou apaixonado por você (change apaixonado to apaixonada if you’re female).
As you may know, Portuguese has two words for “to be”: ser and estar. Their contrast is not simply permanent versus temporary. To say you are in love with someone, use estar apaixonado/apaixonada por; the length of the relationship does not by itself make ser preferable.
“Beautiful” in Portuguese
There are a few ways in Portuguese to tell someone that they’re beautiful.
First off, you could describe someone as bonito (for men) or bonita (for women). This is roughly equivalent to calling someone “pretty” in English.
A stronger word is lindo or linda, which means “beautiful”. The noun lindeza means “beauty”.
Then there’s gostoso/gostosa, which literally means “tasty”, but is a common gíria (slang word) in Brazil for saying that someone is… well, tasty. Tell someone they’re gostoso if you think they’re hot.
The English word “sexy” is also used in Portuguese, with the exact same meaning.
Finally, there’s tesudo or tesuda. This word doesn’t have a direct translation, but if someone is tesudo then it means they make you feel tesão; that is, sexual desire.
Note that tesudo/a is a rather suggestive word. If you tell a girl you just met that you find her tesuda, don’t be surprised if she slaps you in the face!
“Cute” in Portuguese
Another word worth knowing is fofo/fofa, which means “cute”. Use it to describe people, animals, children, or anything that makes you go “awwwwwww”.
Stopping you here in case you’d like to read about someone else’s experience with learning Portuguese. You can read about Holly’s 90-day mission right here!
“I miss you” in Portuguese
There’s a famous word in Portuguese that has no direct English translation. Long-time Fi3M readers may know it, as it’s been mentioned a few times before.
That word is saudade, plural saudades. If you have a saudade for something, it means you feel a deep longing or yearning for it. You miss it!
So to tell someone you miss them in Portuguese, say eu estou com saudades de você – “I have (lit: am with) saudades for you”!
“Heart” in Portuguese
“Heart” in Portuguese is coração. Make sure to pronounce the “-ão” ending correctly, with a nasal sound; this is often a difficult one for learners of Portuguese.
Like in English, and in most languages, Portuguese has a lot of heart-related expressions about relationships and love. A warm, generous person is said to have a grande coração – big heart – or even a coração de ouro – heart of gold. If you want to win someone’s affections, you can try to ganhar o coração – win their heart. Or if your attempts to ganhar o coração are unsuccessful, you may be left with a coração partido – a broken heart.
If something is very important to you, you can say that you feel it do fundo do meu coração; “from the bottom of my heart”.
So next time you see your Portuguese-speaking love interest, let your true feelings be known: te amo do fundo do meu coração – “I love you from the bottom of my heart.”
“Sweetheart” in Portuguese
Portuguese has many terms of endearment – cute, affectionate names by which you might address a loved one, like “sweetheart” or “darling” in English.
One common term of endearment is querido (said to a man) or querida (said to a woman). While it literally means something like “desired”, think of it as like the English word “sweetheart”; it’s the kind of thing a husband might say to his wife (or vice versa).
Another nice term of endearment is bem. Or to keep things simple, address your loved one as amor. I already told you what that one means!
“Boyfriend/girlfriend” in Portuguese
Your “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” in Portuguese is your namorado or namorada. To remember it, think of the English word “enamoured”.
In the early stages of your relationship, you might say that you’re saindo com the other person; “going out with them”. Once things get more serious, and they “officially” become your namorado or namorada, you say that you’re namorando com them. (Com means “with”.)
“Fiancé/fiancée” in Portuguese
Are you ready to pop the question to your namorada? If so, get down on one knee and say você quer casar comigo? – “will you marry me?”. Hopefully he or she will say yes, in which case you’re no longer namorados (boyfriend/girlfriend) but noivos (fiancés/engaged).
If you speak Spanish, beware of the false friend here. In Spanish your novio or novia is your boyfriend or girlfriend, but in Portuguese the cognates noivo and noiva (note the slightly different spelling and pronunciation) mean “fiancé” and “fiancée” respectively. (Your “fiancé/fiancée” in Spanish is your prometido/prometida.) Make sure you don’t mix these words up!
On the day of the casamento (wedding), the words noiva and noivo are still used to refer to the bride and the groom. Portuguese doesn’t have separate words for “bride” and “groom” like English does; you’re still just “fiancés”.
“Husband/wife” in Portuguese
So now that you’re casado (married), what should you call each other? Easy: “husband” in Portuguese is marido and “wife” is esposa. No falsos amigos this time: both words are exactly the same as in Spanish.
Enjoy having an aliança (wedding ring) on your finger. Parabéns (congratulations) on your marriage!
“Love” in Portuguese is a Beautiful Thing
As the Beatles sang, tudo o que você precisa é amor. Well, actually they sang “all you need is love”, but I like how it sounds in Portuguese. Hopefully I’ve given you all the words you need to catch and keep that special someone. Learning another language is, after all, a great way to broaden your potential dating pool. 😉
If you want to hear about someone else’s experience with Portuguese, here is an episode of the Language Hacking podcast that will be a good fit!
Portuguese is a good language to get soppy in, which is one of the reasons I ended up saying my wedding vows in it. If you want more of the everyday side of the language, start with saying hello in Portuguese, while our collection of terms of endearment covers what people call each other in plenty of other languages too.
Romantic phrases are exactly where you want to get the tone right, and that’s the one thing writing can’t teach you, so it’s worth hearing them spoken aloud. You can sign up for PortuguesePod101 for that, and our PortuguesePod101 review explains what you get if you’d like to have a look first.
If you’d like to move beyond compliments and hold a proper conversation, join the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp, where you get 90 days to reach a 15-minute conversation with a native speaker.
Let me know if this post was useful to you, or which was your favourite word or phrase! You can message me on Instagram (@irishpolyglot), TikTok (@irishpolyglot), and X (@languagehacking).
Social