IPA reference · consonant
χ — voiceless uvular fricative
Friction produced right at the back, between the tongue root and the uvula.
How to make the voiceless uvular fricative
Further back than /x/ — it is close to the position you use to gargle, but without vibration.
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 χ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Very close; many descriptions use the two interchangeably, and the boundary varies by dialect.
What this means for learners
The northern Dutch "harde g" and the Hebrew ח for most Israeli speakers are both realised here.
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 χ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol χ make?
χ is the voiceless uvular fricative. Friction produced right at the back, between the tongue root and the uvula. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce χ?
Further back than /x/ — it is close to the position you use to gargle, but without vibration.
Which languages have the voiceless uvular fricative?
Among the languages covered here: Hebrew (לחם, “bread”); Dutch (gracht, “canal”).
What is the difference between χ and x?
Very close; many descriptions use the two interchangeably, and the boundary varies by dialect.