Pronunciation · Everyday words people get wrong
How to pronounce “clothes”
KLOHDHZ
1 syllable · stress on “KLOHDHZ”
In short
Say “clothes” in 3 steps
- 1One syllable. There is no vowel after the th.
- 2Say “clothe”, then add a /z/ without releasing into a new syllable.
- 3Dropping the /ð/ so it sounds like “close” is extremely common and widely accepted in fast speech — but the careful form keeps it.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: KLOH-thez — adding a second syllable, or saying it identically to “close”
The ending stacks a voiced /ð/ against a /z/ with no vowel between them. Most learners either insert a vowel or drop the /ð/ entirely.
Hear real people say it
Model audio is consistent; real speech is not. Hearing several actual speakers is what makes a word recognisable when someone says it at full speed.
Real speakers
3 human recordingsActual people saying “clothes”, not a synthetic voice. Real speech varies — that variation is what you need to recognise, and what a single model voice cannot show you.
Recordings from Wikimedia Commons by Association Shtooka, Judith Franck and Dvortygirl, licensed under CC BY 3.0 us / CC BY-SA 3.0. Full credits.
Practise it out loud
Reading about a sound does not change your mouth. Say it, hear it back, and fix one thing at a time.
Say it yourself
0/6 practisedListen first, then record. You get feedback on the individual sounds, the stress and the rhythm — no account needed, and nothing is stored.
Recordings are used only to generate this feedback and are not stored. Your accent is never penalised: IELTS scores intelligibility, and so do we.
The sounds inside this word
Each links to a full guide with mouth position, audio and drills. If a word keeps failing, the problem is usually one of these.
Don't confuse it with…
Minimal pairs isolate the exact contrast this word depends on — the fastest way to train both ear and mouth.
Who finds this word hardest
Your first language predicts which part of a word will break. These guides list the highest-impact fixes for each.
- Japanese speakers: Japanese has one liquid sound where English has two (making l/r the canonical challenge) and its strict consonant-vowel syllables invite a helper vowel after English finals (strike → sutoraiku).
- Korean speakers: Korean speakers' highest-impact fixes are /f/→/p/ ('coffee' → 'copi'), /z/→/dʒ/ ('zoo' → 'joo'), the r/l alternation, and the helper vowel that sneaks in after final consonants ('finish' → 'finishi').
- Mandarin speakers: Mandarin syllables end only in n or ng, so the single biggest win for Mandarin speakers is final consonants: keeping the ends of words alive, including the -s and -ed that carry English grammar.
- Spanish speakers: Spanish has 5 pure vowels where English has around 20, so the highest-impact work for Spanish speakers is vowel contrasts (ship/sheep, cat/cut) plus the b/v merger and the extra 'e' that sneaks in before s-clusters (eSpain).
- Vietnamese speakers: For Vietnamese speakers one issue towers over all others: final consonants.
More everyday words people get wrong
Same pattern, same fix. Learning them as a group is far faster than one at a time.
Keep exploring
Frequently asked questions
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