Tag: word bus

Brazilian Portuguese Words with Many Meanings: Riding the "Word Bus"

In Brazilian Portuguese, there’s a noun called a palavra-ônibus (literally, word-bus) which is a linguistic term that covers colloquial words that “have many meanings, or that are used to express various vague ideas, in different situations”. Some examples are legal, bacana, troço, and coisa, among others. There’s even the notion of a so-called verbo-ônibus (see examples in Portuguese here) for those kinds of verbs that serve any situation, like pôr, dizer, fazer, ter, coisar and ver.