Articles are words that accompany nouns and may indicate:

•  Gender - masculine, feminine and neuter;

• Number - singular, plural or dual;

• Case - nominative, acusative, genitive, ablative, dative, etc.

Languages use articles in different ways:

•  Some languages (Romanian, German, Greek) have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), while others (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, Catalan) have only two genders (masculine and feminine);

• There are languages (Russian, Latin, Finnish) which lack articles;

• In Dutch, masculine and feminine words use the article de in the singular and plural, and neuter nouns use the article het in the singular and de in the plural;

• Articles in German inflect according to the syntactic role (declension) played by the nouns they accompany.

There are two kinds of articles in Portuguese: definite articles and indefinite articles.

The English definite article the corresponds to four articles in Portuguese:

Article agreement

The definite articles agree in gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural) with the nouns they refer to.

Preposition-article combinations and contractions

The definite articles o, a, os, as and prepositions a, em and por make the following combinations:

Visit the page  The use of the definite articles

The English indefinite articles a and an correspond to four articles in Portuguese:

Visit the page The use of the indefinite articles

For further information on the use of articles, please go to:

Brazilian states - the use of articles

List of countries and the use of articles

Noun gender

Noun gender 2