pedir — to order / request

How to use pedir in Brazilian Portuguese

Pedir is the Brazilian Portuguese verb for to order / request. It is an irregular verb: 1 of its forms in the three tenses below break the regular -ir pattern (peço), 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 peço — I ask for / order. The pretérito perfeito is the finished past, the English simple past: eu pedi — I asked for / ordered. The pretérito imperfeito is for habits, background and how things used to be: eu pedia — I used to ask for / order. Because pedir 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 peça — that I ask for / order — and the imperfeito do subjuntivo, the tense of hypotheticals: eu pedisse — if I asked for / ordered.

Said the Rio way, peço sounds like PEH-soo. The nós form pedimos ends in the carioca “sh”, peh-DJEE-moosh — the most recognisable sound of the Rio accent, where São Paulo says a plain s. Notice pede is PEH-djee: in Brazil a final -de softens to “jee” and -te to “chee”, something European Portuguese never does.