Pronunciation · Words with silent letters
How to pronounce “Wednesday”
WENZ-day
2 syllables · stress on “WENZ”
In short
Say “Wednesday” in 3 steps
- 1Two syllables, not three: WENZ-day.
- 2The d after the e is silent. Go straight from “Wen” to a /z/ sound.
- 3The first vowel is the short /e/ of “bed”, not the /eɪ/ of “wade”.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: WED-nes-day — three syllables, sounding the d and the middle e
The spelling preserves the Old English Wodnesdæg, “Woden's day”. Speech dropped the middle syllable centuries ago and the spelling never followed.
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
2 human recordingsActual people saying “Wednesday”, 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 No machine-readable author provided. Dvortygirl assumed (based on copyright claims)., 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.
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.
- 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).
- Hindi speakers: Hindi speakers' single highest-impact fix is the v/w merger: Hindi has one sound (व) where English has two, so 'wine' and 'vine' collapse.
- Bengali speakers: For Bengali speakers the big three are: /f/ and /v/ hardening into aspirated p and b, /z/ turning into /dʒ/ ('zoo' → 'joo'), and s/sh swapping, plus an extra vowel breaking up consonant clusters (school → ischool).
- Vietnamese speakers: For Vietnamese speakers one issue towers over all others: final consonants.
More words with silent letters
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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The full sound library
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