The /r/ sound in English
/r/ is the American R — 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 /r/ sound
Curl the tongue tip back (or bunch the tongue body up) without touching anything, round the lips slightly, and voice — the tongue must never tap the roof of the mouth.
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 /r/
Trilling or tapping it like Spanish/Italian "r", or replacing it with /l/. It is the single hardest English consonant for most learners.
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 /r/ sound
Start with the classic three — red, sorry, car — then work through real words that contain /r/. Every word below has a full pronunciation page with audio and a sound-by-sound breakdown.
/r/ versus the sounds it gets confused with
These are the sounds that sit closest to /r/ 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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lTouch the tongue tip to the ridge behind the upper teeth and let the voiced air flow around the sides of the tongue. Say “red” (/r/) and “light” (/l/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
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wRound and push the lips forward tightly, raise the back of the tongue, then glide immediately into the following vowel. Say “red” (/r/) and “water” (/w/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
Questions about /r/
- How do you pronounce the /r/ sound?
- Curl the tongue tip back (or bunch the tongue body up) without touching anything, round the lips slightly, and voice — the tongue must never tap the roof of the mouth.
- What words have the /r/ sound?
- red, sorry, car, are, your, more, their, there, here — all contain /r/.
- What is /r/ called?
- /r/ is the American R. 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.