LingoDrop
Spanish · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "la esposa" in Spanish?
lah-es-POH-sah — same word as "esposo" with the feminine a ending.
Three syllables, es-PO-sa, beat on the second-to-last, which is the default placement. Because the article and the final vowel are the only gender markers, and the article is unstressed while the vowel is too, this is a word where two very quiet sounds carry all the grammatical information.
Listen: la esposa
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
Mi esposa trabaja en un hospital.
My wife works at a hospital.
Listen: Mi esposa trabaja en un hospital.
Free browser voice. Hear it read by a real native speaker inside the LingoDrop app.
"Mi esposa trabaja en un hospital" ends on a word with a silent h and an l ending, so "hospital" is stressed on the final syllable: os-pi-TAL. "En un hospital" runs together as e-noo-nos-pi-TAL, with every boundary linked. "Trabaja" has the throaty j.
Where English speakers slip
The final a reduces to "uh" and the s sounds get voiced, giving "es-POH-zuh" — two English habits stacking up on a word where the ending carries the gender. Keep the a open and the s hissed. Note also that "mujer" is widely used to mean wife in casual speech, so hearing "mi mujer" does not mean the speaker has switched topics.