LingoDrop
Italian · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "veloce" in Italian?
veh-LOH-cheh, with the stress landing hard on LOH, rhyming with "so," and a soft "cheh" to finish, as in "check." In IPA: /veˈlo.tʃe/.
Three syllables, ve, lo, and ce, with the stress squarely on the middle syllable — the first and last syllables are both said lightly and quickly by comparison.
Listen: veloce
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Sound it out
"Veloce" is a classic case where an English cognate actively misleads: the word looks like "velocity," but Italian's c before e is nothing like the s sound that letter combination produces in English.
Hear it in a sentence
La macchina è molto veloce.
The car is very fast.
Listen: La macchina è molto veloce.
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"Veloce" is one of the -e ending adjectives that doesn't change for gender, so it describes "la macchina" (the car, feminine) here without needing an -a ending, unlike "basso" or "alto."
Paired with "molto" as an intensifier, the example shows a very ordinary sentence pattern for describing vehicles, speeds, or performance — "veloce" is the go-to word for "fast" in everyday Italian, more common than more technical alternatives like "rapido" in casual speech.
Where English speakers slip
By far the most common mistake is pronouncing the c in "-ce" as an s, saying something like "veh-LOSS" instead of "veh-LOH-cheh." This comes directly from English words borrowed from Latin, like "velocity" itself, where that letter sequence maps to an s sound — Italian never does this: c before e or i is always the "ch" sound in "chip," with no exceptions.
The second slip is misplacing the stress, saying "VEH-loh-cheh" with emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second. Because "velocity" stresses its second syllable in English too, it's an easy trap to stress the wrong syllable in the Italian word by matching the wrong part of the cognate.