Spanish · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "más" in Spanish?

Q: How do you pronounce más in Spanish?

más is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /mas/. It means “more.” mahs, one syllable — a wide-open "ah" and a hissing s, with the accent doing a non-stress job.

mahs, one syllable — a wide-open "ah" and a hissing s, with the accent doing a non-stress job.

más /mas/

One syllable, so the accent is a diacrítico rather than a stress mark. It separates "más" (more) from "mas", an old literary word meaning but. Since almost nobody uses the unaccented form any more, in practice the accent is a historical courtesy — but it is still required in writing.

Listen: más

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Sound it out

m A normal m, lips together, air through the nose.

á A wide-open "ah" as in "father". The accent mark on a single-syllable word cannot be telling you where the stress goes, so it is doing something else entirely.

s A clean voiceless hiss to close. Do not let it soften into a z, and do not let it disappear — the s is part of the word, not a plural marker.

Hear it in a sentence

¿Puedes hablar más despacio?

Can you speak more slowly?

Listen: ¿Puedes hablar más despacio?

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"¿Puedes hablar más despacio?" places "más" before the adverb it intensifies, which is the normal position. "Hablar" starts with a silent h, so "puedes hablar" runs together as PWEH-des-ab-LAR. And "despacio" ends in a fused "cio" syllable — des-PA-syo, three beats, not four.

Where English speakers slip

Flatten the vowel toward English "mass" and you have a different sound entirely: Spanish a is the wide vowel of "father" and needs the jaw genuinely open. The s then gets voiced into a z by English reflex. And in writing, learners routinely drop the accent, producing "mas" — a real word, but one meaning but, which can quietly reverse the sense of a sentence.