Spanish · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "la mano" in Spanish?

Q: How do you pronounce la mano in Spanish?

la mano is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /la ˈma.no/. It means “hand (feminine, despite -o).” lah MAH-noh — feminine despite the -o ending, which is genuinely unusual.

lah MAH-noh — feminine despite the -o ending, which is genuinely unusual.

la mano /la ˈma.no/

MA-no: two syllables, and the first carries the beat, following the default rule. The plural "manos" keeps it, and stays feminine: "las manos". The gender is a leftover from Latin, where the word belonged to a declension that produced feminine nouns ending in -us, and Spanish kept the gender while regularising the spelling.

Listen: la mano

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

Sound it out

la A bright forward l and a wide "ah". The article is the only visible sign that this noun is feminine.

ma A normal m and a wide-open "ah" as in "father", carrying the stress.

no A clean n and a pure "oh", unstressed but fully rounded — and this is the ending that makes the word look masculine.

Hear it in a sentence

Me lavo las manos.

I'm washing my hands.

Listen: Me lavo las manos.

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

"Me lavo las manos" uses the reflexive "lavarse" plus a definite article, where English would say my hands. Spanish never uses a possessive for your own body parts in this construction — the reflexive pronoun already tells you whose hands they are. "Lavo" has a soft b sound for its v.

Where English speakers slip

The gender is the thing to memorise: everything about the -o ending says masculine, and "el mano" is a very common beginner error. It is "la mano", and adjectives must be feminine too — "la mano derecha". Sound-wise, the final o wants reducing to "uh" and both vowels want differentiating, when they should be full and distinct.