LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "la notte (f.)" in Italian?
NOT-teh, with an open "aw" sound in the middle, and the double t held a beat longer than in English. In IPA: /ˈnɔt.te/.
Two syllables, not and te, with the lengthened double t marking a clear break between them.
Listen: la notte (f.)
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Sound it out
"Notte" looks like the English word "note," but the resemblance is misleading on every count — different vowel, different consonant length, and no silent letters at all.
Hear it in a sentence
Buona notte!
Good night!
Listen: Buona notte!
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"Buona notte!" pairs the feminine adjective buona with feminine notte, showing basic gender agreement in its most compact form. Note that the greeting drops the article entirely — you'd normally say "la notte" in a sentence, but fixed exclamatory greetings like this one (alongside "buongiorno" and "buonasera") never take one.
Unlike "buongiorno" and "buonasera," which are usually written as one word, "buona notte" is conventionally kept as two separate words — a small but real spelling inconsistency across this family of greetings.
Where English speakers slip
Because "notte" looks so much like English "note," readers often import that word's long, closed vowel and its silent-e-lengthens-the-vowel pattern, saying something like "NOHT" with a drawn-out sound. Italian has no silent letters and no vowel-lengthening e — every letter is pronounced, and the o here is the open, "aw"-like kind, not the closed one.
The other slip is collapsing the double t into a single one, saying "NOT-eh" without holding the consonant. That length isn't decorative — in other Italian word pairs, a single versus doubled consonant is the only thing separating two completely different words, so the habit of shortening doubles is worth breaking generally, not just here.