IPA reference · vowel
o — close-mid back rounded vowel
A pure mid-high back rounded vowel with no glide.
How to make the close-mid back rounded vowel
The first half of English "go", frozen before the glide. Rounded, back, steady.
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for o, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Italian, French, Portuguese and Bambara contrast the two.
What this means for learners
English speakers diphthongise it to /oʊ/ almost automatically; this is the mirror image of the /e/ problem.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of o attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol o make?
o is the close-mid back rounded vowel. A pure mid-high back rounded vowel with no glide. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce o?
The first half of English "go", frozen before the glide. Rounded, back, steady.
Which languages have the close-mid back rounded vowel?
Among the languages covered here: Spanish (todo, “all”); Italian (sole, “sun”).
What is the difference between o and ɔ?
Italian, French, Portuguese and Bambara contrast the two.