From now on, the 280 million Portuguese speakers will be able to say phrases like “she is the pele of tennis” or “he is the pele of quantum physics”, with the full backing of the dictionary.
The new word, grammatically considered an adjective, was defined as follows:
“Something or someone that is out of the ordinary, something or someone that by virtue of its quality, value or superiority cannot be equaled to anything or anyone, as well as Pelé, nickname for Edson Arantes do Nascimento (1940-2022), considered the greatest athlete of all time; exceptional, incomparable, unique”.
The dictionary, yes, indicates with an R that the new word is a registered trademark.
The inclusion of ‘Pelé’ in the dictionary It was the result of a campaign promoted by the Pelé Foundation, which collected 125,000 signatures on the Internet in a couple of months.
The campaign had the support of Santos, the club where ‘O Rei’ played most of his sports career, and the communication group Globo.
Unlike Spanish, in Portuguese there is no dictionary considered normative and that has the support of the national academies of the nine countries where the language is official, one of the most spoken in the world.
The Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), the body that governs the language in the country where two-thirds of Lusophones live, launched its own dictionary in 2021, but it still does not include the word ‘Pelé’.
Pelé, considered by many the best footballer of all timedied on December 29 at the age of 82, as a result of multi-organ failure derived from colon cancer that he had suffered from the previous year.
So far, he is the only player who has won three World Cups with his team: Sweden 1958, Chile 1962 and Mexico 1970.
With information from EFE