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Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "il leone (m.)" in Italian?
leh-OH-neh, stress on the middle syllable. In IPA: /leˈone/. All three vowels stay fully separate, no blending into a diphthong.
Three syllables, le-o-ne, with the e and o kept in genuinely separate syllables rather than merging, the way "ia" did in "maiale." The stress falls on that middle o, which is held long.
Listen: il leone (m.)
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Sound it out
Whether two adjacent vowels merge into a glide or stay split across two syllables isn't something Italian spelling marks reliably, it has to be learned word by word. "Maiale" merged its i and a into one syllable; "leone" keeps its e and o fully apart, a genuine hiatus rather than a diphthong.
Hear it in a sentence
Il leone dorme al sole.
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Listen: Il leone dorme al sole.
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"Il leone dorme al sole" uses "al," the contraction of "a" plus "il," to mean "in the sun," literally closer to "at/to the sun." This is a good example of an Italian preposition choice that doesn't map onto English word for word; English "in the sun" would tempt a learner toward "in" rather than "a."
"Dorme" is the same third-person singular of "dormire" already seen with "il gatto," reinforcing that regular -ire pattern.
Where English speakers slip
English speakers often collapse the "eo" sequence into something closer to a single diphthong, the way a quickly-said English word like "neon" can blur its vowels together. In "leone," the e and o need to stay two fully distinct syllables.
The second slip is shifting the stress to the first syllable, LEH-o-neh, likely by analogy with the English cognate "leo." Italian stresses the middle syllable, le-O-ne.