Mano, which is the word for hand in Italian, has its origins in the Latin word manus, which also means hand. A curiosity about this word is that, despite ending in the letter o (which is usually associated with masculine nouns) mano is actually feminine. This is because the Latin manus is a fourth-declension feminine …
A sasso (stone) that has been made smooth and round by the action of water is a ciottolo (pebble) in Italian. It is the diminutive form of ciotto, an archaic word for pebble. Ciottolo is a masculine noun whose plural form is ciottoli. The definite and indefinite articles it takes are as follows: Prese un …
An Italian word that many of our readers and followers on Facebook have been requesting is allora, so let’s dive straight in! Allora is an extremely flexible word in that it can function as an adverb, conjunction or adjective depending on how it is used in a sentence. We’ve decided this article into three sections …
Upon seeing the -ERE verb pretendere in Italian, you would be forgiven for assuming that it means “to pretend”. In actual fact, pretendere is a classic example of a false friend, or a word that looks or sounds similar to a word in another language but has a different meaning. In Italian, pretendere tends to …
One of the hardest words to pronounce in Italian for English speakers is the feminine noun aiuola, which means flowerbed. Why is it so difficult, you might ask? Well, it has a lot to do with the presence of four adjacent vowel sounds, a phenomenon that doesn’t really occur in English. In fact, the plural …
Certo is the Italian word for certain or sure. It derives from the Latin certum, the past participle of cernĕre meaning “to distinguish”. Being an adjective, its form changes to match the gender and/or number of the noun it describes. We should start out with some good news for English speaking learners: certo covers more …