LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "dire" in Italian?
DEE-reh, stress on the first syllable. In IPA: /ˈdi.re/. Nothing like the English word it's spelled identically to.
Two even syllables, di and re, each fully pronounced. English "dire" collapses to one syllable; Italian dire never does.
Listen: dire
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Set aside everything the English word "dire" tells you about this spelling — Italian vowels are always pure, so i is always a clean "ee," never the long "eye" sound English gives it before a final e.
Hear it in a sentence
Non so cosa dire.
I don't know what to say.
Listen: Non so cosa dire.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Non so cosa dire" is a fixed, extremely common phrase — "I don't know what to say" — built from so ("I know," from sapere) plus cosa ("what") plus the bare infinitive dire, with no "to" needed the way English requires. It's the kind of thing you'd say when genuinely at a loss for words, in almost any register.
Because dire is one of Italian's core irregular verbs, its infinitive form shown here is actually the most stable part of it — the conjugated forms (dico, dici, dice…) shift more than the vowel pattern of the infinitive does.
Where English speakers slip
The most specific trap is the spelling match with the English word "dire," meaning terrible, pronounced "DYE-er." Seeing the identical letters makes it tempting to reach for that pronunciation, but the Italian word shares nothing with it phonetically — the i is always a short, pure "ee."
The second slip is the familiar one: swallowing the final e as if it were silent, the way it is in the English homograph. Italian dire keeps that e as a fully voiced second syllable.