How to Pronounce 'Esse': Portuguese (Brazil) Pronunciation Guide

Q: How do you pronounce esse in Portuguese (Brazil)?

esse is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ˈe.si/. It means “this (m.).” EH-see. The double s is just a single hissed s, and the final e comes out as "ee."

How do you pronounce "esse" in Portuguese (Brazil)?

EH-see. The double s is just a single hissed s, and the final e comes out as "ee."

esse /ˈe.si/

The word ends in -e, so the default rule puts the stress on the second-to-last syllable, "es-," and no accent is written. Portuguese has a three-way demonstrative system — este for near me, esse for near you, aquele for over there — and all three follow this same default stress pattern.

Listen: esse

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Sound it out

e A closed e, the vowel of "they" minus its glide, carrying all the weight. It stays fully oral — nothing here nasalizes it.

ss Doubling the s in Portuguese doesn't lengthen anything; it exists to keep the sound unvoiced between two vowels. A single s in that position would become a z, which is why "casa" is "KAH-zah" but "esse" is "EH-see."

e The closing e lands as "ee." Since an s isn't altered by a following i the way a t or d would be, this ending is simply "see" with no palatalization.

Hear it in a sentence

Esse livro é meu.

This book is mine.

Listen: Esse livro é meu.

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"Esse livro é meu" ends on "meu," a one-syllable possessive with the same e-plus-w-glide shape as the pronoun "eu." The demonstrative itself links straight into "livro," whose r is a single tap inside the consonant cluster rather than the throaty h it would be at the start of a word.

Where English speakers slip

Learners hear the double s and lengthen it into "ess-suh," which Portuguese never does — consonant length isn't meaningful in this language. The final vowel is the other trap: "EH-say" with a full "ay" ending is the standard beginner version, and Brazilians raise it to "ee." In casual speech you'll also hear the reduced form "esse" collapsing toward "se" in fixed phrases, which can be disorienting at first.