The /h/ sound in English
/h/ is the H sound — a consonant 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 /h/ sound
Simply breathe out through an open, relaxed mouth already shaped for the following vowel — there is no tongue or lip contact at all.
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 /h/
Dropping /h/ entirely ("ouse" for "house"), or scraping it in the throat like German "ach".
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 /h/ sound
Start with the classic three — house, behind, ahead — then work through real words that contain /h/. Every word below has a full pronunciation page with audio and a sound-by-sound breakdown.
/h/ versus the sounds it gets confused with
These are the sounds that sit closest to /h/ 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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kRaise the back of the tongue to touch the soft palate, seal the air, then release it with a puff. Say “house” (/h/) and “cat” (/k/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
Questions about /h/
- How do you pronounce the /h/ sound?
- Simply breathe out through an open, relaxed mouth already shaped for the following vowel — there is no tongue or lip contact at all.
- What words have the /h/ sound?
- house, behind, ahead, have, home, his, here, who, health — all contain /h/.
- What is /h/ called?
- /h/ is the H sound. It is a consonant 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.