LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "morire" in Italian?
moh-REE-reh, stressed on the second syllable. In IPA: /moˈri.re/. This is the dictionary form; the example sentence actually uses an irregular conjugated form, "muoio," which sounds quite different.
Three syllables, mo, ri, and re, evenly spaced, with the stress landing on the middle syllable, "ri."
Listen: morire
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Sound it out
"Morire" itself is straightforward to sound out. What trips learners up is that its most common present-tense form, "muoio," looks nothing like the infinitive: the stressed o turns into the diphthong "uo," a stem change shared by a handful of irregular -ire verbs.
Hear it in a sentence
Muoio di fame!
I'm starving!
Listen: Muoio di fame!
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"Muoio di fame!" is a fixed idiomatic exclamation, literally "I'm dying of hunger," used the same way English speakers say "I'm starving!" without meaning it literally. "Muoio" is the irregular io-form of "morire": the stressed o diphthongizes to "uo" (mo-ri-re becomes muo-io), a pattern also seen in verbs like "potere"-adjacent irregulars, and it's the everyday form you'll hear far more often than the plain infinitive in casual speech. The same "morire di" pattern extends to other exaggerated complaints, "morire di noia" (dying of boredom), "morire di caldo" (dying of heat).
Where English speakers slip
Because the example sentence uses "muoio" rather than "morire," learners sometimes try to apply morire's stress pattern to it, but "muoio" is pronounced /ˈmwɔjo/, stressed on the first syllable with a diphthong, a genuinely different shape from the infinitive.
For "morire" itself, the common mistake is stressing the first syllable, "MOR-ire," pulled by the resemblance to English "more." Correct Italian stress falls on the second syllable, mo-RI-re, and the r throughout is a light single tap, never the harder American r.