Spanish · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "hoy" in Spanish?

Q: How do you pronounce hoy in Spanish?

hoy is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /oj/. It means “today.” oy — one syllable, silent h, and the vowel glides like the end of English "boy".

oy — one syllable, silent h, and the vowel glides like the end of English "boy".

hoy /oj/

A single syllable, so the rule has nothing to act on. It is worth contrasting with "hay" (there is), which differs only in the first half of its glide — "eye" versus "oy" — and with "ay", an exclamation. All three have silent h's or none at all, and all three are single beats.

Listen: hoy

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

Sound it out

h Silent, so the word opens directly on the vowel with no breath at all.

oy A single gliding vowel, starting at a pure "oh" and closing toward "ee" — the same shape as the end of English "boy". The y is doing vowel work here, not consonant work.

Hear it in a sentence

Hoy no trabajo.

I'm not working today.

Listen: Hoy no trabajo.

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

"Hoy no trabajo" puts the time adverb first and the negation directly before the verb, which is standard Spanish order. "Trabajo" has a throaty j and a soft b between vowels, and it is stressed tra-BA-jo on the second-to-last syllable. Spanish uses the plain present where English needs a progressive.

Where English speakers slip

Let a breath escape at the front and you get English "hoy!", which sounds close enough to be understood but marks the speaker immediately. There is no breath at all. The other confusion is with "hay": the two words sit side by side in sentences like "hoy hay clase", and learners regularly swap them because they look almost identical on the page.