Word.ws English Dictionary

sertão

sertão noun: the semi-arid, barren inland portion of northeastern Brazil.

Noun

sertão (plural sertãos or sertões)

  1. The semi-arid, barren inland portion of northeastern Brazil.
    • The news soon spread throughout the sertão: the saint who had wandered the length and breadth of the land for a quarter of a century had put down roots in that place surrounded by stony hills called Canudos […].1984, Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Helen R. Lane, The War of the End of the World, Folio Society, published 2012, page 58
  2. (broadly) A similarly arid area in another region or country.

Forms of sertão

pluralsertãos
pluralsertões

Origin of sertão

Borrowed from Portuguese sertão.

Questions about sertão

What does sertão mean?
Sertão means the semi-arid, barren inland portion of northeastern Brazil.
What part of speech is sertão?
Sertão is a noun.
What is the plural of sertão?
The plural of sertão is sertãos.

Words near sertão in the dictionary

  1. Sertorians
  2. sertraline
  3. SERTs
  4. sertularian
  5. sertularians
  6. sertão
  7. sertãos
  8. Serua
  9. seruant
  10. seruante
  11. seruantes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sertão (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sertão.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sert%C3%A3o. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.