How to pronounce lawn in American English

IPA /lɑn/ Syllables 1 · lahn Stress 1st syllable

LAHN

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Americans pronounce lawn as LAHN (/lɑn/). You'll hear it in sentences like "He mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges over the weekend".

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Sound by sound

Every sound in "lawn".

1 syllable, 3 sounds. Explore each sound's mouth shape and how it's made.

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.

n/n/

Touch the tip or front edge of your tongue to the roof of your mouth behind your teeth. Air flows through your nose.

In real conversation

Hear "lawn" in the wild.

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"He mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges over the weekend."

hee MOHD dhuh LAHN and TRIHMD dhuh HEH·juhz OH·ver dhuh WEE·kehnd

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Questions

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Is the American pronunciation of "lawn" 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 "LAHN" reflects the casual American form; British dictionaries typically print a citation form with crisper consonants and different vowel choices.