LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "mille" in Italian?
MEEL-leh, with a firm double l in the middle. In IPA: /ˈmille/.
Two syllables, mil and le, and that double l is doing real work: it's held noticeably longer than a single l, not just a spelling quirk.
Listen: mille
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Sound it out
The doubled consonant in the middle is the key feature: Italian spelling doubles letters to signal a genuinely longer, more forceful sound than the single version, a feature called gemination that English doesn't really have.
Hear it in a sentence
Questo libro ha mille pagine.
This book has a thousand pages.
Listen: Questo libro ha mille pagine.
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In "Questo libro ha mille pagine," mille appears in its bare invariable form for exactly 1000 (it only shifts, irregularly, to "mila" for duemila, tremila, and so on). Questo agrees with the masculine libro, and ha (from avere) marks the possession the way "has" does in English.
As with cento, Italian doesn't need an article before mille; ha mille pagine states the quantity directly, with no "a" required the way English needs before "thousand."
Where English speakers slip
The most common mistake is flattening the double l into a single one, saying something closer to "MEE-leh." That merges mille (thousand) with words that genuinely have a single l; consonant length is one of the few things distinguishing minimal pairs like this in Italian, so it isn't optional polish.
Some learners also shorten the stressed i, saying "MIH-leh" with the vowel from "bit." Italian i before a double consonant stays tight and closed, closer to the ee in "see."