dormir — to sleep

How to use dormir in Brazilian Portuguese

Dormir is the Brazilian Portuguese verb for to sleep. It is an irregular verb: 1 of its forms in the three tenses below break the regular -ir pattern (durmo), and those are the ones to learn by heart.

Three tenses do almost all the work in conversation. The presente covers the present and the near future: eu durmo — I sleep. The pretérito perfeito is the finished past, the English simple past: eu dormi — I slept. The pretérito imperfeito is for habits, background and how things used to be: eu dormia — I used to sleep / was sleeping. Because dormir is one of the 58 most-used verbs, the page also has both subjunctives: the presente do subjuntivo, the mood of wishes, doubts and “quero que…” — eu durma — that I sleep — and the imperfeito do subjuntivo, the tense of hypotheticals: eu dormisse — if I slept.

Said the Rio way, durmo sounds like DOOR-moo. The nós form dormimos ends in the carioca “sh”, dohr-MEE-moosh — the most recognisable sound of the Rio accent, where São Paulo says a plain s.