Deixaste

Deixaste is a verb form in Portuguese that corresponds to the second-person singular of the pretérito perfeito do indicativo for the verb deixar. It expresses a completed action in the past and is most commonly found in European Portuguese. In Brazilian Portuguese, the corresponding everyday form is usually você deixou, with tu deixaste being less common outside certain regional dialects.

Conjugation and usage. Deixar is a regular -ar verb, and deixaste is the second-person singular form for tu in the pretérito perfeito: eu deixei, tu deixaste, ele deixou, nós deixamos, vós deixastes, eles deixaram. This form is used when addressing someone informally with the pronoun tu, a usage prevalent in Portugal and some Portuguese-speaking communities. The meaning of deixaste depends on the context and can be transitive, as in deixaste o livro na mesa ("you left the book on the table"), or part of a verbal construction such as deixaste de fumar ("you stopped smoking").

Other notes. Deixaste can also appear in phrases formed with deixar de, where deixaste de is followed by an infinitive to express cessation or abandonment of an activity, for example: deixaste de estudar à noite com os amigos. Although widely understood, deixaste is less frequent in standard Brazilian Portuguese due to the predominant use of você deixou in the past tense; regional speech, however, may preserve tu deixaste in some communities.

See also. Deixar, deixasteis (the vos/vós form in European Portuguese), and related forms in Galician and Spanish, where equivalent verb forms exist with similar meanings. The word belongs to the family of Romance languages and shares roots with deixar in Portuguese and dejar in Spanish.