German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "essen" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce essen in German?

essen is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈɛ.sn̩/. It means “to eat.” ESS-n, beginning with a tiny catch in the throat and ending with an n that swallows its own vowel.

ESS-n, beginning with a tiny catch in the throat and ending with an n that swallows its own vowel.

essen /ˈɛ.sn̩/

The punch goes on ES-, as with virtually every German infinitive — the -en ending is permanently unstressed. Even when the verb picks up a prefix the root keeps its identity: compare essen with aufessen, where auf takes the beat but the essen part remains the recognisable core.

Listen: essen

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Sound it out

e Short, open 'e' as in bed. German words that begin with a vowel take a small glottal stop first — the little click in the middle of English uh-oh — so the word starts with a clean edge instead of smearing into the word before.

ss An unvoiced hiss, doubled to mark the short vowel in front of it.

en In ordinary speech this loses its vowel: the s releases straight into a syllabic n. ESS-n, not 'ESS-en'.

Hear it in a sentence

Wir essen um sieben.

We eat at seven.

Listen: Wir essen um sieben.

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Wir essen um sieben conjugates the verb for wir, and the wir form happens to be identical to the infinitive. Clock times take um, and sieben ends in the same syllabic n as essen, so the sentence closes with two matching unstressed hums.

Where English speakers slip

The temptation is to link the verb to the word before it, gliding 'wir-essen' into one stream the way English does in 'we're eating'. German inserts a hard onset instead — a brief closure of the vocal cords before any initial vowel. Beyond that, learners give the -en ending a full e, which sounds stiff and over-enunciated; let the n take over the whole syllable.