Como Se Escreve A Palavra Show

Spelling "show" in Portuguese isn't as simple as you'd think

The word show enters Portuguese as a direct borrowing from English, and in its basic form it keeps the exact same four letters. That said, treating it like a regular Portuguese noun gets tricky fast, especially when you're working with inflection and agreement in actual writing.

Como se escreve a palavra show

It is spelled show, no cedilla, no tilde, no extra h. The plural is shows. When used as an adjective in compound forms, it stays invariable: a festa foi um show de talentos, for example. But here is where people trip up: in Portuguese, the word is masculine by default, so you write um show, o show, not uma show. I have seen this mistake in published material more often than I care to admit. The real difficulty comes with adaptation. Some older texts try to write it as xou, following the Portuguese phonetic pattern for the "sh" sound, but that spelling is archaic and virtually never used today. If you write "xou" in a contemporary document, it looks like a mistake or an attempt at deliberate informality. Stick to show.

I ran into this problem recently when editing a press release for a concert venue in São Paulo. The writer had used "a show" throughout the text, applying feminine agreement based on some vague intuition about the word sounding soft. We caught it during review and corrected every instance to masculine. It is a common error because the ending -w does not look obviously masculine to Portuguese speakers, but the word takes masculine articles and adjectives without question. There is also the question of accentuation. The word never takes an accent mark in any form. You will occasionally see shó or s hô in meme culture or satirical writing, but these are stylistic choices, not correct spelling. The normative form, recognized by the principal Portuguese dictionaries including the Priberam and the Michaelis, remains simply show.

If you need a quick reference, the entry exists under "show" in the Dicionário Aurélio and in the Houaiss. Both list it as a masculine noun with the plural shows. No alternative spelling is given as standard. One edge case worth noting: when the word appears inside a compound like show de variedades or music show, the entire phrase follows the gender of the head noun, which is show, so everything stays masculine. This does not change even if the accompanying nouns are feminine, which trips up a lot of writers.