How to pronounce the W sound /w/
/w/ is a voiced consonant made at lips plus soft palate (labiovelar). Round your lips tightly, as if you were about to say 'oo'. Raise the back of your tongue at the same time.
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How to make it
- 1Round your lips tightly, as if you were about to say 'oo'.
- 2Raise the back of your tongue at the same time.
- 3Turn the voice on and glide quickly into the vowel — W is a movement, not a held sound.
- 4Keep your teeth off your lip: teeth-on-lip gives you V.
- Lips
- Pushed forward and tightly rounded, then released.
- Tongue
- Back raised toward the soft palate, tip low.
- Jaw
- Nearly closed at the start, opening into the vowel.
Feel it
Put a hand flat on your throat and say the sound. It should buzz under your fingers from the very start — if the buzz only arrives with the vowel, you are making the voiceless version.Where the sound appears
Keeping it through a whole line
We walked away from the wet window on Wednesday.
What a wonderful world of warm water.
Minimal pairs to drill
Each of these is two words separated by exactly one sound. If a listener hears the wrong one, the problem is the contrast, not the effort.
If your first language is…
Nothing here is about ability. Every one of these is a sound system doing exactly what it was built to do, applied to a language that asks for something else.
- HindiUrdu
Hindi and Urdu use one sound where English has both /v/ and /w/, so 'west' and 'vest' come out the same; tight lip rounding with no teeth is what makes it a W.
- Punjabi
Punjabi merges v and w in the same way, so the rounding has to be exaggerated at first.
- Bengali
Bengali has no w distinct from its b and bh sounds, so it is usually replaced by a b-like start.
- Gujarati
Gujarati has a single v-w sound too, so the English pair collapses into one.
- Marathi
Marathi's single lip-approximant covers both English sounds, so W often arrives with the teeth too close to the lip.
- Japanese
Japanese w occurs only before a, so 'we', 'wood' and 'wet' need the rounding built for new vowels.
- Korean
Korean has w-glides before several vowels, so the sound is available, though it does not appear before every English vowel.
- Thai
Thai has w at the start and end of syllables, so the sound is secure; the difficulty is English words where w is silent, like 'write'.
- French
French has w in loanwords and in 'oui', so the sound is available, though English 'wh' spellings can pull it toward V.
- German
German w is pronounced as English V, so 'wine' regularly comes out as 'vine'.
- Russian
Russian has v but no w, so 'water' can begin with a teeth-on-lip buzz.
- Turkish
Turkish v is often a lip sound close to W, which helps, but the teeth version can still appear in 'work'.
Straight answers
Is /w/ voiced or voiceless?
It is voiced. Put a hand on your throat and say it: you should feel a buzz the whole time. Every English vowel is voiced too, so the buzz never stops between this sound and the vowel next to it.
What words start with the W sound?
Common ones include water, we, work. In the middle of a word you get away, always, between. Every one of those links to its own pronunciation page here.
How is /w/ spelled in English?
It is written "w", "wh", "u", "qu", "o". English spelling and English sound came apart centuries ago, so the same sound turns up under several spellings and the same spelling carries several sounds — which is why the sound, not the letter, is the thing to learn.
Why do Hindi & Urdu speakers find /w/ hard?
Hindi and Urdu use one sound where English has both /v/ and /w/, so 'west' and 'vest' come out the same; tight lip rounding with no teeth is what makes it a W.
Record the W sound and see if it landed
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