# Estória vs. história URL: https://joaocosta.dev/blog/3 Published: 2020-02-03 · 4 min read 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/estória) and [história](https://dicionario.priberam.org/história) 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/estória) or that [it means the same as English's 'story'](https://dicionario.priberam.org/estória). 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.