The three rules
Stress is the syllable you say a little louder and longer: in English, PHO-to but pho-TO-graph-er. A syllable is a beat of a word with one vowel sound at its centre: ca-sa has two. English gives you no rule for stress; Spanish gives you three, and they have almost no exceptions.
- 1Ends in a vowel, n or s Stress the second-to-last syllable. No accent is written, because this is the normal pattern.
- 2Ends in any other consonant Stress the last syllable. Again no accent, because the word follows the rule.
- 3Breaks rule 1 or 2 Write an accent on the stressed vowel. The accent is the exception sign; it never appears on a word that follows the rules.
Rule 1 covers most Spanish words, because most end in a vowel, and plurals and many verb forms end in -s or -n. That is why the default rhythm of Spanish leans on the second-to-last beat: ha-BLA-mos (we speak), COR-ren (they run).
Find the stress
Choose a word. The word splits into syllables, the stressed one turns red, and the note says which rule decided it.
Accents that tell two words apart
A handful of short words are spelled the same and sound the same, but mean different things. Spanish puts an accent on one of each pair so readers can tell them apart in writing. This kind of accent is called a diacritic accent (from the Greek for “distinguishing”). It does not change the pronunciation at all.
| With accent | Without | Both in one sentence |
|---|---|---|
| él he | el the | Élhetienehaselthelibro.book“He has the book.” |
| tú you | tu your | Túyoutieneshavetuyourllave.key“You have your key.” |
| sí yes | si if | Sí,yessiifpuedo.(I) can“Yes, if I can.” |
| mí me | mi my | Mimyregalogiftesisparaformí.me“My present is for me.” |
| té tea | te you (object) | ¿Teto-youhago(I) makeunaté?tea“Shall I make you a tea?” |
| sé I know | se itself, oneself | Nonotsé(I) knowcómohowseitselfdice.says“I don’t know how it’s said.” |
| más more | mas but (literary) | Quiero(I) wantmásmoretiempo.time“I want more time. (Mas, meaning “but”, is rare outside literature.)” |
Notice that the accented word is usually the one that carries more weight in the sentence: the pronoun él (he) against the little article el (the). The words for “the”, called articles, are covered in gender and articles.
Question words always carry an accent
Words like what, where and how take an accent when they ask something, including inside a longer sentence (“I don’t know where she lives”). The same words without an accent link two parts of a statement. Compare each pair.
The full set is qué (what), quién (who), cuál (which), cómo (how), dónde (where), cuándo (when), cuánto (how much) and por qué (why). Porque, written as one word with no accent, means “because”.
Upside-down ¿ and ¡
Spanish opens every question with ¿ and every exclamation with ¡, then closes it with the usual ? or !. The opening mark tells a reader to use question or exclamation intonation from the first word, which matters because a Spanish question often has the same word order as a statement.
Typing accents on an English keyboard
Accents are part of the spelling, so leaving them out is a spelling slip, and in pairs like sí and si it changes the meaning. Capital letters keep their accents too: Ángel, Él.