LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "il lavoro (m.)" in Italian?
eel lah-VOH-roh, stress on the middle syllable, closed o. In IPA: /il laˈvo.ro/. Both r's are a single light tap each, not rolled or doubled.
Three syllables, la, vo, and ro, with the article il out front and the stress on vo.
Listen: il lavoro (m.)
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Sound it out
The stressed o here is closed, a tighter and more rounded sound than the open o in words like scuola or moglie — a contrast English doesn't make at all, so it takes deliberate attention. Both r's, one in each unstressed syllable around it, are single light taps, not trills.
Hear it in a sentence
Ho un nuovo lavoro.
I have a new job.
Listen: Ho un nuovo lavoro.
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"Ho un nuovo lavoro" places nuovo before the noun rather than after it. Most descriptive adjectives in Italian follow the noun (as antica does in una città antica), but a small set of frequent adjectives — nuovo, bello, buono, grande among them — commonly come first, giving the phrase a more idiomatic feel than a strictly descriptive one would have.
"Ho," from the irregular verb avere, needs no separate subject pronoun, the same pattern seen throughout this list with lavora, vive, and studia.
Where English speakers slip
Because English makes no distinction between open and closed o, the stressed o in lavoro often gets blurred with the open o found in words like scuola or moglie elsewhere on this list, when Italian treats them as two genuinely different sounds.
The two r's also invite over-rolling into trilled sounds, especially by learners who've studied Spanish. Both are single light taps here; a trilled or doubled r belongs only to words spelled with rr.