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 …
We all know that one person who acts as if he or she knows everything and dismisses the opinions, comments, or suggestions of others. In English, the best word to describe a person like this is know-it-all (or know-all) whereas in Italian, you’ll probably hear people using the terms sapientone (for a man) and sapientona …
Do you enjoy spending time by the seaside? Then you will love today’s word! The sea in Italian translates as mare, which should be easy to remember as it closely resembles the English word marine. It derives from the Latin mare of the same spelling. It is a masculine noun that takes the following definite …