English Consonant Sounds in IPA: All 24 With Examples

English has 24 consonant sounds, written in IPA as /p b t d k ɡ tʃ dʒ f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h m n ŋ l r w j/. That is three more sounds than the alphabet has consonant letters, which is why several of them need symbols you will not find on a keyboard. Type any word into the pronunciation Studio, pick British or American, and press play to hear the consonants in it.

This guide is the consonant half of the English sound system. The vowel sounds have their own guide, and the two sets barely overlap, so you can learn them separately without losing anything.

What a consonant sound actually is

A consonant is a sound made by getting in the way of the air leaving your mouth. You either stop the air completely, squeeze it through a narrow gap, send it out through your nose, or shape it loosely with your tongue and lips. A vowel does none of that: the air flows out freely and only the shape of the mouth changes.

That is the whole distinction, and it explains why the word church has six letters but three consonant sounds, /tʃɜːtʃ/. The letters ch spell one sound, and the u is a vowel. Counting sounds and counting letters give different answers almost every time, which is the reason IPA exists.

Every consonant in English can be pinned down by answering three questions. Is the voice on or off? Where in the mouth is the blockage? What kind of blockage is it? Those three answers, in that order, describe any consonant precisely.

The first question, voicing, has a guide of its own, so this page keeps it short. Put two fingers on your throat and hold a long “sss”, then switch to “zzz”. The buzz that starts up is voicing. If that split is new to you, the guide to voiced and voiceless consonants covers the eight pairs and the reason they matter for plurals and past tenses.

The 24 English consonant sounds

Here is the full inventory. The IPA is the standard British transcription used across this site, and the respelling column is the plain “sounds like” version, with capitals marking a stressed syllable where a word has more than one.

Fifteen of those symbols are just the ordinary letter. The nine that are not are /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /θ/, /ð/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /ŋ/, /j/, and /ɡ/, which is a single-storey g rather than the one your font usually draws. Learn those nine and the consonant half of IPA is finished.

Where in the mouth each consonant is made

The second question, place, is just a location. Run your tongue from your lips backwards and you pass every place English uses. Knowing the place is what lets you fix a sound instead of guessing at it, because it tells you exactly which part of your mouth to move.

/w/ appears in the bilabial row but it also raises the back of the tongue, so full descriptions call it labial-velar. That double action is why it feels like a moving sound rather than a fixed position, and it is part of why /w/ and /v/ get confused: /v/ uses the teeth, /w/ never does.

The third question, manner, is what kind of blockage you make. That is the organising idea for the rest of this guide, so the next five sections take the manners one at a time.

Plosives: the six sounds that stop the air

A plosive, also called a stop, is made by blocking the air completely and then letting it go. There are six, in three voiced and voiceless pairs.

/p/ and /b/ close both lips. /t/ and /d/ press the tongue tip against the ridge just behind your top teeth. /k/ and /ɡ/ raise the back of the tongue against the soft roof of the mouth. In each pair the mouth does exactly the same thing and only the voice changes.

Two details are worth knowing. At the start of a stressed syllable, /p/, /t/ and /k/ come out with a small puff of air, which is why pin feels breathier than spin. And at the end of a word, English speakers often hold the closure without releasing it much, so the final /t/ in sit can be almost silent. Neither changes the word, but both change how natural it sounds.

/t/ is the one plosive that moves around between accents. Many American speakers turn it into a fast tap between vowels, so water and better get a sound closer to a quick /d/. Standard British keeps a clear /t/ there. Both are normal in their own accent.

Fricatives: the nine sounds that squeeze the air

A fricative is made by narrowing the passage until the air hisses through. English has nine, which makes this the largest group.

/f/ and /v/ put the top teeth on the bottom lip. /θ/ and /ð/ put the tongue tip at or between the teeth. /s/ and /z/ send a thin stream along the tongue to the ridge behind the teeth. /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ do the same a little further back with rounder lips. /h/ makes its friction in the throat and has no voiced partner.

/ʒ/ is the rarest consonant in English. It never starts a native English word, and the handful of words that begin with it, such as genre /ˈʒɒnrə/, are all borrowed from French. Most of the time you will meet it in the middle of a word, in measure, usual, decision, and treasure.

The two TH fricatives cause more trouble than the other seven combined, because many languages have no sound like them. They have a full guide of their own covering tongue position, the substitutions learners make, and minimal pairs: read the two TH sounds.

Affricates: the two sounds that do both

An affricate starts as a stop and ends as a fricative, all in one sound. English has two, and they are a voiceless and voiced pair.

/tʃ/ is the sound in chair /tʃeə/, watch /wɒtʃ/, and nature /ˈneɪtʃə/. /dʒ/ is the sound in jam /dʒæm/, bridge /brɪdʒ/, and age /eɪdʒ/.

The symbols look like two letters because the sound really is a /t/ running straight into a /ʃ/. English treats the result as one unit, so it counts as a single consonant and can sit alone at the start or end of a word. Notice how many different spellings hide it: church, nature, question and cello all use /tʃ/, while jam, gem, bridge and soldier all use /dʒ/.

Nasals: the three sounds that go through the nose

For a nasal, the mouth is completely blocked but the soft palate drops and lets the air out through the nose instead. All three English nasals are voiced.

/m/ blocks with the lips, as in man /mæn/. /n/ blocks with the tongue tip, as in no /nəʊ/. /ŋ/ blocks with the back of the tongue, as in sing /sɪŋ/.

/ŋ/ is the one that needs attention. It never begins an English word, so you only ever meet it in the middle or at the end. The spelling ng sometimes stands for /ŋ/ alone and sometimes for /ŋɡ/, and the letters give no clue which.

A useful pattern: when the ng belongs to a verb that has taken an ending, as in sing plus -er, the g stays silent. When ng sits inside a single indivisible word like finger, the /ɡ/ is usually pronounced. Comparative forms such as longer and strongest go against that and keep the /ɡ/.

Approximants: the four sounds that barely touch

An approximant narrows the mouth a little, but not enough to make friction. These four are the most vowel-like consonants in English, and all are voiced.

/l/ raises the tongue tip to the ridge behind the teeth and lets the air flow around the sides. /r/ in most English accents curls or bunches the tongue near the roof of the mouth without touching it. /w/ rounds the lips. /j/ is the sound at the start of yes, made with the tongue high and forward.

Two notes on /l/ and /r/. English /l/ has two shades: a light one before a vowel in leaf, and a darker, heavier one after a vowel in feel. They are the same phoneme, so both are written /l/. And /r/ is where British and American split most visibly. In car, American English pronounces the /r/ and British English does not, which is why the same word is transcribed /kɑːr/ for American and /kɑː/ for British.

If /r/ and /l/ sound alike to you, or /v/ and /w/ do, those contrasts get full treatment in the R vs L guide and the V vs W guide.

Where each consonant can sit in a word

Not every consonant is free to appear anywhere. Three of the 24 have real restrictions, and knowing them saves you from hunting for examples that do not exist.

/ŋ/ never starts a word. /ʒ/ starts only borrowed words. /h/, /w/ and /j/ never end a word in standard English, because what looks like a final w or y in now and boy is really part of a vowel, /naʊ/ and /bɔɪ/.

The /r/ row is the one to watch. In standard British, car is /kɑː/ with no /r/ sound at all, and the letter r at the end of a word only comes back to life when the next word starts with a vowel, as in car alarm. In American English the /r/ is always there. That single difference accounts for a large share of the gap between the two accents.

The consonants learners find hardest

Difficulty is not a property of a sound. It is the gap between English and the sound system you already have, which is why different first languages produce different trouble spots.

/θ/ and /ð/ are the most widely reported problem, since most of the world’s languages lack them. The usual replacements are /t/ and /d/, /s/ and /z/, or /f/ and /v/. All three substitutions also exist in native English accents, so they are a matter of accent rather than error.

/r/ and /l/ sit in nearly the same part of the mouth and differ mainly in whether the tongue tip touches the ridge. Speakers of Japanese, Korean and several other languages hear them as one category at first, which makes right and light hard to separate.

/v/ and /w/ get swapped in both directions by speakers of German, Hindi, Urdu and many Slavic languages, because the two sounds are split differently in those systems.

/ŋ/ at the end of a word is hard for anyone whose language only allows a plain /n/ there, and the fix is usually to stop the tongue tip from rising at all.

Final consonants in general are the quiet difficulty. Many languages end syllables with a vowel, so English words like asked /ɑːskt/ and twelfths /twɛlfθs/ ask for something the mouth has never had to do. That is a clusters problem more than a single-sound problem.

The same sound, many spellings

Consonant sounds are worth learning separately from letters because English spelling reuses letters freely. One sound can be written several ways, and one letter can stand for several sounds.

Some letters go the other way and spell nothing at all. The k in knee, the b in thumb and the w in write are all silent, and there are patterns behind them. The guide to silent letters lists the main groups with a hundred examples.

Consonants next to consonants

A single consonant is manageable. Several in a row is where pronunciation gets physical. English allows up to three consonants at the start of a word, as in street /striːt/, and up to four at the end, as in texts /tɛksts/.

Say strengths /strɛŋθs/ slowly and you can feel how much work the end of that word asks for: /ŋ/, then /θ/, then /s/, with no vowel to rest on. Learners often solve the problem by inserting a small vowel, turning street into something like “suh-treet”, or by dropping a consonant. Both are common and both are fixable. The consonant clusters guide works through the initial and final groups with practice words.

Practice: name the consonant

Say each word, then decide which consonant sound the bold part stands for. Cover the answers first.

1. sure
2. bridge
3. sing
4. phone
5. measure
6. who
7. nature
8. xylophone
9. soldier
10. sixth

Two of those are worth a second look. Nature and soldier show a pattern that catches people out: a /t/ or /d/ followed by the /j/ sound often merges into /tʃ/ or /dʒ/. It is the same process that turns did you into something like “dij you” in ordinary speech, covered in the connected speech guide.

Where to go next

Twenty-four consonants, five groups, three questions per sound. That is the whole consonant system, and it is a much smaller job than the vowels, which shift noticeably between accents while the consonants mostly hold still.

The fastest way to make the symbols stick is to use them on words you already say. Type a word into the Studio, read the transcription, and check each consonant against the table above. If the symbols themselves are still unfamiliar, start with how to read IPA, then pick a contrast that gives you trouble and drill it with minimal pairs.