The /ʒ/ sound in English
/ʒ/ is the ZH 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 /ʒ/ sound
Same as /ʃ/ — tongue blade behind the ridge, lips slightly rounded — but with the voice turned on.
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 /ʒ/
Hardening it into /dʒ/, so "vision" sounds like "vi-jun"; /ʒ/ is a smooth continuous buzz with no stop closure.
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 /ʒ/ sound
Start with the classic three — vision, measure, garage — then work through real words that contain /ʒ/. Every word below has a full pronunciation page with audio and a sound-by-sound breakdown.
/ʒ/ versus the sounds it gets confused with
These are the sounds that sit closest to /ʒ/ in the mouth, and the ones that swallow it when a learner is not careful. Learn each pair as a pair:
-
ʃPull the tongue slightly back from the /s/ position, spread the blade wide behind the ridge, round the lips a little, and push air through with no voice. Say “vision” (/ʒ/) and “she” (/ʃ/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
-
dʒThe voiced twin of /tʃ/: stop the air with the tongue at the ridge and release it into a voiced /ʒ/ buzz. Say “vision” (/ʒ/) and “jump” (/dʒ/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
-
zExactly the /s/ tongue position with voicing added, so the airflow buzzes. Say “vision” (/ʒ/) and “zoo” (/z/) back to back until the two stop blurring together.
Questions about /ʒ/
- How do you pronounce the /ʒ/ sound?
- Same as /ʃ/ — tongue blade behind the ridge, lips slightly rounded — but with the voice turned on.
- What words have the /ʒ/ sound?
- vision, measure, garage, version, usually, decision, division, measure, lingerie — all contain /ʒ/.
- What is /ʒ/ called?
- /ʒ/ is the ZH 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.