How to Pronounce 'Nessuno': Italian Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce nessuno in Italian?

nessuno is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /nesˈsu.no/. It means “no one.” nes-SOO-noh , stress punching the middle syllable. In IPA: /nesˈsu.no/ . The doubled s gives a longer, more forceful hiss than a single s would.

How do you pronounce "nessuno" in Italian?

nes-SOO-noh, stress punching the middle syllable. In IPA: /nesˈsu.no/. The doubled s gives a longer, more forceful hiss than a single s would.

nessuno /nesˈsu.no/

Three syllables, nes, su, and no, with the stress landing squarely on su — not on the first syllable the way an English reader's instinct might suggest.

Listen: nessuno

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

Sound it out

The double s here isn't decorative. In Italian, doubled consonants are actually held longer in speech than single ones, a feature called gemination that English spelling has no real equivalent for (English doubles letters for historical reasons, not to signal extra length).

nes A short, closed first syllable, like the "ness" in English "business."

su The stressed syllable: a doubled s held noticeably longer than a single s, then a pure "oo" as in "boot," never a schwa.

no A short, closed "noh," clipped with no glide at the end.

Hear it in a sentence

Non c'è nessuno qui.

There's no one here.

Listen: Non c'è nessuno qui.

Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.

"Non c'è nessuno qui" shows the construction Italian requires: a negative verb (non c'è) paired with a negative pronoun (nessuno), both present at once. English collapses this into a single negative — "there's no one here" — so translating word for word into English gives a double negative that sounds wrong, even though the Italian sentence is completely standard.

"Nessuno" also changes ending for gender when used as an adjective ("nessuna persona"), but as a standalone pronoun meaning "no one," as it is here, it stays in this masculine-looking default form.

Where English speakers slip

English readers often default to first-syllable stress, saying "NESS-uno," the way English tends to front-load stress in unfamiliar multisyllable words. Italian actually stresses the middle syllable: "nes-SU-no."

The other habit is treating the double s like English double letters — silent as far as pronunciation goes, as in "letter" versus "later," where the tt isn't held any longer than the t. In Italian, "ss" is genuinely longer than a single "s" would be, and skipping that length flattens the word's rhythm.