How to pronounce cloth in American English

IPA /klɑθ/ Syllables 1 · klahth Stress 1st syllable

KLAHTH

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Americans pronounce cloth as KLAHTH (/klɑθ/). You'll hear it in sentences like "Nathan threw the thick cloth on the path" or "The boss lost the cost of the lost cloth" — more examples below.

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Sound by sound

Every sound in "cloth".

1 syllable, 4 sounds. Explore each sound's mouth shape and how it's made.

k/k/

Raise the back of your tongue to touch the soft palate (velum). Stop the air, then release.

l/l/

Place the tip of your tongue against the alveolar ridge just behind your top front teeth, the same contact point as /t/, /d/, and /n/. The difference is what happens to the air: for /l/, you let it flow continuously around the <em>sides</em> of the tongue (that's why /l/ is called a lateral). Turn your voice on the whole time. Lips stay relaxed, no rounding or flaring. For the Dark L variant at the end of a syllable, also pull the back of the tongue up and back toward the soft palate.

ah/ɑ/

Relax your lips and drop your jaw significantly. The tongue tip lightly touches behind the bottom front teeth and the back part of the tongue presses down a little to create more dark space in the back of the mouth.

th/θ/

Place the very tip of your tongue slightly between your teeth. Blow air gently around it without voicing.

In real conversation

Hear "cloth" in the wild.

Click any sentence to see the full breakdown — every link, every reduction, every flap-T.

"Nathan threw the thick cloth on the path."

NAY·thuhn THROO dhuh THIHK KLAHTH ahn dhuh PATH

"The boss lost the cost of the lost cloth."

dhuh BAHS LAHST dhuh kahst uhv dhuh LAHST KLAHTH

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Questions

Questions people ask about this.

Is the American pronunciation of "cloth" different from British English?

American English uses different vowel shapes, a relaxed retroflex R, and connected-speech tricks like flap-T and glottal-stop T that British Received Pronunciation generally avoids. The respell "KLAHTH" reflects the casual American form; British dictionaries typically print a citation form with crisper consonants and different vowel choices.