German · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "tausend" in German?

Q: How do you pronounce tausend in German?

tausend is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈtaʊ̯.zn̩t/. It means “thousand.” TOW-znt, its first part rhyming with English cow. The s buzzes like a z, and the written final d is pronounced as a t.

TOW-znt, its first part rhyming with English cow. The s buzzes like a z, and the written final d is pronounced as a t.

tausend /ˈtaʊ̯.zn̩t/

Weight on TAU-, ending swallowed. Like hundert it surrenders the main stress inside a larger number: in dreitausend the DREI leads and tausend follows as a lighter beat, so the biggest-sounding part of the word is not necessarily the loudest.

Listen: tausend

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

au The diphthong of how and cow. German au is always this sound and never the 'aw' of caught.

s Voiced like English z, because it starts a syllable in front of a vowel.

end Reduced to a syllabic n plus t. The written d sits at the end of the word, so it hardens to t: 'znt'.

Hear it in a sentence

Hier arbeiten tausend Menschen.

A thousand people work here.

Listen: Hier arbeiten tausend Menschen.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Hier arbeiten tausend Menschen opens with the adverb hier, which forces arbeiten into second position and pushes the subject behind it — the inversion German demands whenever anything but the subject starts a statement. Menschen has the sch of English sh and closes on the reduced syllabic n.

Where English speakers slip

Final consonant devoicing catches people out here: they say 'TOW-zend' with an audible d, because that is what the page shows. German hardens b, d and g to p, t and k at the end of a word, so this one finishes on a clear t. The s is the other half — it is voiced, so 'TOW-sent' manages to get both consonants wrong at once.