The /ɜːr/ sound in English
/ɜːr/ is the stressed ER (NURSE) — a vowel of English. Here is how to make it with your mouth, what usually goes wrong, which words carry it, and the sounds it gets confused with.
How to make the /ɜːr/ sound
Hold the tongue central and bunched or curled back for the whole vowel, with the R quality present from beginning to end — it is one continuous r-coloured vowel, not a vowel plus an /r/.
Practise it on its own before you put it in a word: hold the position, make the sound, then release. Once it is stable in isolation, drop it into the example words below and keep the same mouth shape — most of the difficulty of an English sound disappears the moment your tongue and lips are physically in the right place.
The mistake learners make with /ɜːr/
Inserting a separate vowel before the /r/ ("bur-ud" for "bird"), or dropping the r-colouring entirely.
If that description sounds like you, work through the contrast pairs further down: hearing the difference reliably always comes before producing it reliably.
Words with the /ɜːr/ sound
Start with the classic three — bird, work, learn — then work through real words that contain /ɜːr/. Every word below has a full pronunciation page with audio and a sound-by-sound breakdown.
/ɜːr/ versus the sounds it gets confused with
These are the sounds nearest /ɜːr/ in the mouth, and the ones that swallow it when a learner is not careful. Learn each pair as a pair:
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ərThe same r-coloured tongue shape as /ɜːr/ but weak, short and unstressed — the ending of "teacher", "doctor", "sugar". Say “bird” (/ɜːr/) and “teacher” (/ər/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
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ʌKeep the tongue central and slightly low with a relaxed, neutral mouth — like a stressed, fuller version of the schwa. Say “bird” (/ɜːr/) and “cut” (/ʌ/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
Questions about /ɜːr/
- How do you pronounce the /ɜːr/ sound?
- Hold the tongue central and bunched or curled back for the whole vowel, with the R quality present from beginning to end — it is one continuous r-coloured vowel, not a vowel plus an /r/.
- What words have the /ɜːr/ sound?
- bird, work, learn, search, were, service, world, work, her — all contain /ɜːr/.
- What is /ɜːr/ called?
- /ɜːr/ is the stressed ER (NURSE). It is a vowel in the English sound system.
Stop looking words up one at a time
One sound at a time is slow. PHONO puts the IPA above every word of whatever you are reading — in your browser, in a PDF, in any app — the moment you select it. An offline pronunciation dictionary, US and UK audio, one hotkey.