It’s difficult to believe that we are already well into the month of May, known as maggio in Italian. Maggio is the fifth month of the year (quinto mese dell’anno) according to the Julian and Gregorian calendars. As is the case with all months of the year, maggio isn’t capitalised in Italian as it is …
The affectionate name children use towards their father (padre) in Italian is papà. It is the equivalent of dad, daddy or pa in English. A very easy mistake you might make when you first start learning Italian is to accidentally place the emphasis on the first rather than the last syllable. If you place it …
The name almost all children call their mother (madre) in Italian, no matter their age, is mamma, which translates as mom / mommy in American English or mum / mummy in British English. Three possible variations are the affectionate diminutives mammi, mami and mammina. When using a possessive adjective like mia (my), you have the …
Faith, or fede in Italian, can be defined as either the strong belief in something based on spiritual conviction rather than hard proof, or the complete trust in someone or something. The word can be traced back to the Latin fidem, which ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *bʰeydʰ-. Fede is a feminine noun that takes …
A useful word to know in Italian if you’re feeling a bit under the weather is tosse which means cough. It comes from the Latin tussim from which the verb tossire (to cough) also derives. Tosse is a feminine noun that takes the following definite and indefinite articles: Ho una brutta tosse e il mal di …
Today’s word of the day is something extremely annoying and sometimes quite hard to get rid of: the hiccups (also spelled hiccoughs) which in Italian translates as singhiozzo (masculine, plural: singhiozzi). It comes from the verb singhiozzare meaning to hiccup (when referring to a human being) or to go by fits and starts (when talking …