Professionals that translate from English to Portuguese often face a certain demand from clients when it comes to translating dialogues: diversifying the verbs that introduce reported speech, in an attempt to avoid repeating the verb dizer (say) in Portuguese. In order to help solve such problem, this study aims at developing a glossary of verbs that introduce reported speech. To reach that aim, we conducted a corpus-based descriptive research, in order to compile a quotation verbs lexicon for the Portuguese language. Thus, this study promoted a wide collection of quotation verbs, as well as stablished patters of usage in which these verbs are commonly found and put forward a classification of these verbs into groups of meaning. This study proposes two main objectives, which have led to concrete contributions: (i) the elaboration of a reported speech verbs glossary for translators of Portuguese, which is called DISSE (said, in Portuguese), and (ii) the description of such verb class in Portuguese, with a semantic approach and based on large corpora. As secondary contributions, but far from unimportant and close to final implementation, it is possible to highlight (iii) the creation and the public availability of annotated corpora, including a semantic annotation for reported speech verbs and (iv) the collaboration with the preparation of systems capable of automatically identifying quotations in Portuguese-written texts.