French · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "plein" in French?

plan — one nasal syllable, where "-ein" is the same vowel as in "pain" and "main", not "ayn".

plein /plɛ̃/

One nasal syllable. The feminine "pleine" is /plɛn/, with a real "n" and no nasalization — so the two forms sound distinctly different even though they look almost identical.

Listen: plein

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Sound it out

pl An unaspirated "p" into a light "l", with no puff of air between them.

ein The nasal vowel /ɛ̃/ — an open "eh" sent through the nose. This spelling joins "ain", "in", "aim" and "ym" as ways of writing the same nasal, which is one of French orthography's less helpful features.

Hear it in a sentence

Le train est plein.

The train is full.

Listen: Le train est plein.

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"Le train est plein" ends on the adjective, so the nasal vowel gets its full length. Notice the sentence contains two nasal vowels of different kinds: "train" and "plein" happen to share /ɛ̃/, giving the phrase an internal rhyme. "Est" between them is just /ɛ/, a bare open vowel.

Where English speakers slip

Learners read "-ein" as they would in English "vein" or "rein", giving "playn". It is a nasal, and the tongue must never touch. The other slip is the feminine: "pleine" un-nasalizes completely, so applying the masculine sound to a feminine noun is audibly wrong. Note also the idiom "faire le plein", which means to fill up with fuel.