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# Estória vs. história
published 2020-02-03 · 4 min read · https://joaocosta.dev/blog/3

A story about the two Portuguese words: estória and história.

## First, a bit of context

Recently, I made a great friend. We have been talking frequently for almost two
months now and it has been great. She is a fantastic girl. After some days of
talking, I noticed something interesting. She is the first Portuguese friend I
have with whom I talk mostly through private messages. Up until now, I have
almost exclusively used VoIP services to talk with my close friends. For me,
private messages have always been something used only for short, occasional
conversations, e.g.: asking where/when to meet up.

## Why I'm talking about this

It is fairly usual for us to tell stories to one another when we're 'talking'
and this raised a problem for me when writing: should I say estória or história?
I remembered my 12th grade Portuguese telling me about a mistake I had made in
one of the tests. I didn't know about the word estória, so I didn't use it
correctly. He told me that estória referred to a narrative or fiction and
história to something factual that happened in a society/the world and the
science that studies that (just like 'story' and 'history').

So, in English, we have the words 'story' and 'history', and in Portuguese, we
have the roughly equivalent words estória and história. Case solved?

### No, the case isn't solved

Even with all this, there was still one question left to answer: why did I never
see people using this word when it should be used?

Obviously, I didn't go around telling people to use the correct word because
that would be impolite and I wasn't sure if I was right given the circumstance.
With this, I never really learned the truth about these two words :/, so I
turned to a dictionary and the Internet.

### The dictionaries didn't help

I have two Portuguese dictionaries at my mom's place, so I went to pick them up
and took the opportunity to pay a visit to the rest of the family. I started by
taking a look at the blue one. It was the bigger one with around twice as many
words as the orange one (the smaller one). In this dictionary, estória wasn't
listed and história covered both of the meanings I was looking for: narrative
and fiction, and facts of the past and the science them. This explained why I
never saw people using the word estória. After that, I picked up the orange
dictionary and, to my surprise, it listed both estória and história with the
respective meanings I was expecting from the beginning. What the bleep?¿ (I've
always found upside down question marks funny).

Besides the colors and sizes, there was one more notable difference between my
two dictionaries: there are almost 10 years between their edition dates and
there was a controversial spelling agreement between those two dates. Could
estória be a new word?

### Time to surf the web

Well, I didn't need to search very far to get an answer to this question from a
reliable source. Both estória (https://dicionario.priberam.org/est%C3%B3ria) and
história (https://dicionario.priberam.org/hist%C3%B3ria) exist, and they are
both derived from the Latin word historía. Estória isn't a new word
(https://www.flip.pt/Duvidas-Linguisticas/Duvida-Linguistica/DID/457). It is
just not wildly accept by Portuguese scholars/dictionaries, so the most reliable
sources either say that estória has the same meaning as _historía_
(https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa/est%C3%B3ria) or that it
means the same as English's 'story'
(https://dicionario.priberam.org/est%C3%B3ria). Between all this confusion,
there are two things that the dictionaries seem to have agreed on: estória
shouldn't be used given all the controversy and historía has kept its full,
original meaning (meaning both 'story' and 'history'). This makes estória
unneeded.

## Conclusion

I have to admit I'm a bit angry that my 12th grade teacher gave me a lower grade
because of something like this. Knowing that teacher, I'm surprised he supported
a new word like this. I'd say he probably didn't know where it came from,
otherwise I'm sure he'd flip out at anyone that used it.

I think I'm going to go back to always saying/writing história. It's safer and
sounds better. Good thing I didn't go around 'correcting' people about this
topic. Hope you enjoyed this small journey over the Portuguese language :3.

## Closing notes

I've started using LanguageTool (https://languagetool.org/) with ALE
(https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale) for vim, which gave me the perfect
excuse to go over my vim configuration files and clean stuff up. I've also tried
some more technical prose/text linters like write-good
(https://github.com/btford/write-good) and RedPen
(https://github.com/redpen-cc/redpen) but they too strict for the style of
writing I want to do. Still, I think I will use RedPen
(https://github.com/redpen-cc/redpen) when writing text in programming projects,
e.g.: Doxygen documentation and README.md files. So ye, now that my
prose-writing setup is working, I decided to push this blog idea to the top of
pile so I could try it out. It appears to be working just like it should.

One more thing. I'll be trying my best to keep the tags at the top consistent
over the time, so if you want to see all my posts related to a given tag, you
can just click it. Maybe I'll create a page to group/list all the tags I use.
This way, they can be easily accessed at all times. Stay safe :P

PS: A reader suggested leaving a link to this blog post
(https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/talking-aloud-talking-allowed-watch-write-make-sure-right/)
here. It can be interesting for people learning English and is related to the
topic at hand.

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