The Spanish Alphabet: 27 Letters, Sounds, and How to Say Them

The Spanish alphabet chart (all 27 letters)

Here's the full Spanish alphabet chart, all 27 letters from a to zeta. Each row gives you the letter, its Spanish name, how that name sounds out loud, the sound the letter makes inside a word, and a real example word. The letters and the example words stay the same in every language.

Two sounds shift by region, and the table flags both: c before e or i (and z) is a soft 's' across Latin America but a 'th' (as in think) in most of Spain. Treat the example words as your first vocabulary list.

Want to hear each letter? SpanishDict's alphabet guide has native audio for all 27. Ready to build words with them? The Spanish hub lines up your next lessons.

The letter names: spelling out loud in Spanish

You just met each letter's name in the chart. When a Spanish speaker spells a word aloud, they say these names, so ojo is 'o, jota, o.' Most names are easy for English speakers, but a few carry regional variants worth knowing so you aren't thrown when you hear them.

Because b and v sound the same, speakers need a way to tell them apart out loud. That's why you'll hear be grande (big B) versus ve chica (little V) across much of Latin America, or plain be versus uve under the naming the Real Academia Española now recommends. Either pairing works; use whichever your region uses. One more: the letter i is sometimes called i latina to set it apart from y, the i griega.

Spanish sounds that trip up English speakers

Spanish is close to phonetic: spell a word correctly and you can say it, with none of the silent-letter traps of English 'though' or 'knight.' Only a handful of sounds don't map neatly onto English. Get comfortable with these seven and your accent takes a real step forward.

• The silent h. The letter h makes no sound on its own. Hola is 'OH-lah,' hospital is 'os-pee-TAL.' Just skip it. (The one exception is the digraph ch, which we'll cover next.)
• The throaty j and soft g. The j, and g before e or i, come from the back of the throat, close to the ch in Scottish loch or German Bach. Think jamón (ham) and gente (people), not the soft English 'j' of 'jam.'
• The letter ñ. ñ is 'ny,' the sound in 'canyon.' Año means year; drop the tilde and ano means something else entirely, so that little wave earns its keep. It grew out of a medieval shorthand for double-n, and it's the one letter that sets the Spanish alphabet apart.
• b and v are one sound. Here's the surprise: Spanish b and v are pronounced identically, both a soft 'b.' Vaca (cow) and baca (roof rack) sound exactly the same. So no, Spanish speakers don't pronounce b as an English 'v'; both letters get the b-sound, and the 'v' of 'van' simply isn't used in standard Spanish.
• Two r's, tapped and rolled. A single r between vowels is a light tap, like the middle of American 'ladder' (pero, but). Double rr is a full trill (perro, dog). An r starting a word rolls too (rosa). Since pero and perro mean different things, this pair is worth drilling.
• ll and y usually merge. Across most of the Spanish-speaking world, ll and y sound the same, a 'y' as in 'yes' (llave, key, is 'YAH-veh'). Linguists call this merger yeísmo. A few areas still give ll a distinct 'ly,' but 'y' is understood everywhere.
• c and z change by region. Before e or i, c sounds like 's' in Latin America and southern Spain (called seseo) but like the 'th' in 'think' across most of Spain (distinción). z behaves the same way. Gracias is 'GRAH-syas' in Mexico and 'GRAH-thyas' in Madrid. Both are correct, and neither is a lisp.

Is ch, ll, or rr a letter? The 2010 Spanish alphabet change

You may have learned that Spanish has 29 letters, with ch and ll on the list. Here's the honest, up-to-date version.

A digraph is two letters that spell a single sound, and Spanish has three you'll use constantly:

So why isn't the count 29? For most of the twentieth century, dictionaries treated ch and ll as separate letters with their own sections, so words starting with ch came after all the c words. In 1994 the Spanish language academies changed the sorting so ch and ll filed under c and l like any other pair. Then in 2010, the Real Academia Española's new orthography formally dropped ch and ll from the official list of letters, and the alphabet settled at 27. You can read the academies' reasoning in the history of Spanish orthography.

And rr? It was never an official standalone letter, because no Spanish word begins with it. You'll roll it all the time (perro, carro, guitarra), but it doesn't get its own slot. The takeaway is simple: learn ch, ll, and rr as sounds, and count the alphabet as 27 letters.

¿Cómo se escribe? Spelling out loud in Spanish

One question you'll use from day one is ¿Cómo se escribe?, which means 'How do you spell it?' Giving your email, catching a name, booking a table: spelling out loud is a real skill, and now you have the letter names to do it. A few phrases carry most of the weight:

• ¿Cómo se escribe? = how do you spell it?
• Se escribe... = it's spelled...
• con hache / sin hache = with an h / without an h (handy, since h is silent)
• doble ele = double l (that's the ll)
• con acento = with an accent mark; todo junto = all one word
• be de burro, uve de vaca = B as in burro, V as in vaca, to tell the twins apart

Say your name is Sofía. Out loud, that's 'ese, o, efe, i con acento, a.' Now try a friend's name, then your street. These drills feel small, but they turn the alphabet from a chart into something you can use at a café, a hotel desk, or a sign-up form. Once the letters feel solid, put them to work in your first lessons: the numbers in Spanish, the days of the week, and your first verb with ser, the verb for 'to be'.