Incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like... specifically involving Portuguese.
- In Portuguese, ano means "year". The plural anos (years), usuallynote sounds like ânus (anus). Once a reporter asked a female criminal who had just been arrested "Quantos anos você tem?" (literally "How many years you have", but meaning "How old are you"). The woman sarcastically answered "Ânus, eu só tenho um, mas se você quer saber minha idade, é 26" ("I have only one anus, but, if you want to know my age, it's 26").
- In 1987, a German football player named Franco Foda played in Brazil. When he was announced, the stadium audience pissed themselves laughing. Why? His name just so happens to be (admittedly broken) Portuguese for "fucking for free."
- In Portuguese, "labia" means "lips" and "meaningless conversation".
- In a case crossing with Clean Dub Name, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones had in Portuguese Count Dooku changing his name to "Dookan" because "Dooku" is pronounced identically to "do cu" which means "from the ass". Although George Lucas didn't seem to mind that the original name is itself reminiscent of "dookie" — American slang for "crap" (as a noun).
- Brazilian Portuguese also offers many examples.
- The name of Brazilian soccer player Kaká sounds almost the same (without the accent) as the Latin form used in many other Romance languages (Spanish and French mainly) to say crap. Plenty of jokes were made whenever he'd play in the Brazil national football team alongside Elano (whose name sounds exactly like Spanish for "the anus").
- In Rome's dialect it sounds like the verb "to shit". Cue tons of jokes when Kaká was playing in AC Milan and Totti, then captain of the Roma who speaks exclusively in his dialect, announced before a game that he didn't fear him.
- While technically Portuguese, Thiago Motta, another soccer player, counts. His name sounds like I make weed (for you).
- And there's another Brazilian player named Junior Borracha (real name: Enivaldo Manoel do Carmo Júnior).
- The name of Brazilian soccer player Kaká sounds almost the same (without the accent) as the Latin form used in many other Romance languages (Spanish and French mainly) to say crap. Plenty of jokes were made whenever he'd play in the Brazil national football team alongside Elano (whose name sounds exactly like Spanish for "the anus").
- The Portuguese word "esquisito" means "weird", not "exquisite".
- "This isn't a library!" Except in French/Spanish/Portuguese/Italian a librairie/librería/livreria/libreria is a bookshop, and a library is called a bibliothèque/biblioteca/biblioteca/biblioteca.
- Portuguese "engraçado/a" ("funny; amusing") sounds like Italian "ingrassato/a" ("to have gained weight").
- In Portuguese, Sega (the video game company) sounds like "cega" ("blind female").
- In Spanish "mudar" only means "to move out". It means that in Portuguese too, but with the additional meaning of "to change". So if a Portuguese person says they're going to mudar, they might mean they're looking for a new house or they might just be planning renovations.
- "apelido" in Brazilian Portuguese means "nickname". "apellido" in Spanish means "surname". "sobrenome" in Brazilian Portuguese means "surname". "sobrenombre" in Spanish means "nickname".
- "acordar" means "to agree" in Spanish and "to wake up" in Portuguese. The French word "accorder" means "to agree", like the Spanish, but it also means "to award" and "to tune a musical instrument".
- "presunto" is a noun meaning "ham" in Portuguese and an adjective meaning "presumably" in Spanish. As seen on Tumblr
, a brand of crisps writes the flavour in both Portuguese and Spanish, and ends up saying something like "ham — presumably" in Spanish. - "curva" (the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese word for "curve") sounds like "kurva", the word for "whore" in many Slavic languages. Incidentally, in Scandinavian countries the word also means "curve" but is spelled exactly like the Slavic version.
- Palworld got hit with this in Brazilian Portuguese. "Pal" happens to sound like "pau" (wood or stick), which is a common slang term for the penis in that language. The Brazilian fans had a field day with this, making dirty memes and jokes about it. An example can be seen here.
