German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "heißen" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce heißen in German?

heißen is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈhaɪ̯.sn̩/. It means “to be called.” HY-sn. A breathed h, the 'eye' diphthong, and the ß as a plain hissing s.

HY-sn. A breathed h, the 'eye' diphthong, and the ß as a plain hissing s.

heißen /ˈhaɪ̯.sn̩/

The beat rides the diphthong, which holds nearly all of the word's duration. The conjugated forms pile consonants onto the end without adding weight: du heißt has ß and t back to back, which is a cluster worth slowing down for before you can say it at speed.

Listen: heißen

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Sound it out

h A full, audible h — word-initial h is never silent here.

ei 'Eye' — the same sound as the English pronoun I.

ß An unvoiced s, and its presence confirms that what comes before it is long or a diphthong — which it is.

en A syllabic n — no vowel, just the nasal doing a whole syllable's work.

Hear it in a sentence

Wie heißt du?

What's your name?

Listen: Wie heißt du?

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Wie heißt du? is literally 'how are you called', which is why the question word is wie and not was. German treats a name as something you are called rather than something you have, and the whole phrase is best memorised as a unit rather than assembled from English.

Where English speakers slip

The ß gets misread as a B, and the ei gets read as 'ee' — the two commonest German spelling errors landing in one four-letter word. It is 'HY-sn'. Then there is the idiom: learners produce was ist dein Name, which is understandable but stiff, where a German would ask wie heißt du without hesitation.