Two-syllable nouns
Two-syllable nouns almost always take the stress on the first syllable.
- TAble
- MOney
- TEAcher
- PROblem
Pronunciation
Put the stress in the right place
Word stress is the pronunciation feature examiners hear first. Listen, tap the stressed syllable, and find the patterns you keep getting wrong.
Listen and mark
Ten words, one tap each
Your browser says a word out loud. The syllables appear as boxes. Tap the one that carries the stress, and the trainer tells you straight away whether you were right and which rule the word belongs to.
- Ten words a round, drawn across all eight pattern families.
- Ninety-six words that come up constantly in Speaking answers.
- A rule every time, so you learn the family rather than the word.
No sign-in and nothing stored. Sound is optional — the spelling is always on screen.
Practise by family
Pick one pattern and drill it
Word 1 of 10
Practising
Which syllable is stressed?
Your browser can’t speak this word; mark the stress from the spelling.
Press 1–5 to mark a syllable, Space to replay
Your round
You got 0 / 10
Marked against British English stress.
The patterns you missed
Challenge a friend
The rules behind the round
The eight patterns
Eight families cover most of the words an IELTS answer actually uses. Learn the family and you have the word, plus every other word shaped like it.
Two-syllable verbs
Two-syllable verbs almost always take the stress on the second syllable.
- deCIDE
- beGIN
- exPLAIN
- aGREE
Noun and verb pairs that shift
Same spelling, two words: the noun stresses the first syllable, the verb the second.
- REcord noun
- reCORD verb
- PREsent noun
- preSENT verb
Words ending -tion and -sion
Words ending -tion or -sion stress the syllable immediately before that ending.
- eduCAtion
- inforMAtion
- deCIsion
- polLUtion
Endings -ity, -ic and -ical
The endings -ity, -ic and -ical pull the stress onto the syllable just before them.
- uniVERsity
- aBIlity
- opporTUnity
- comMUnity
Verbs ending -ate and -ise
Verbs ending -ate or -ise stress the third syllable from the end.
- comMUnicate
- apPREciate
- CONcentrate
- ORganise
Compound nouns
Compound nouns put the stress on the first part: it is a BOOKshop, never a bookSHOP.
- BOOKshop
- AIRport
- LAPtop
- HOMEwork
The words candidates misstress most
No rule rescues these: they are simply the words candidates put the stress on wrongly most often.
- deVElopment
- PHOtograph
- phoTOgrapher
- photoGRAphic
What is actually marked
Why stress matters more than accent
Pronunciation is one of the four criteria a Speaking answer is marked on, and the public band descriptors do not describe it as a matter of sounding native. They describe a set of features — where the stress falls, the rhythm that stress creates, and the intonation laid over it — and they judge how much of that set you use, how flexibly you use it, and how long you keep it up. Stress is the feature doing most of the work, because it is what tells a listener where one word ends and the next begins.
Accent is treated far more gently than most candidates expect. By Band 8 the descriptors say an accent from your first language has minimal effect on how easily you are understood: the accent is allowed to stay, provided the listener does not have to work for it. That is why a word like phoTOgrapher said with the stress on the first syllable costs you more than any vowel you will ever mispronounce — the stress pattern is what the ear uses to recognise the word at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which variety counts, what stress costs you, and how to drill it alone.
Does IELTS test British or American stress?
Neither, specifically. IELTS accepts any standard variety of English and marks how clearly you can be understood, not which accent you carry, so British and American stress are both acceptable as long as you are consistent. A handful of words are genuinely stressed differently on each side of the Atlantic — advertisement and research are the two you will meet most — and this trainer marks the British pronunciation as the answer and tells you when the American one differs.
Can I lose marks for word stress?
Indirectly, yes. Pronunciation is one of the four criteria your Speaking answer is marked on, and the descriptors treat stress, rhythm and intonation as pronunciation features rather than optional extras. Nobody deducts points for one misplaced syllable, but stress that lands in the wrong place repeatedly makes an examiner work to follow you, and how much effort listening to you takes is exactly what the pronunciation band measures.
How do I practise stress without a teacher?
Use a dictionary and your own voice. Look up any long word you plan to use and read the stress mark before the stressed syllable, then say the word while tapping the table on that syllable so the beat is physical rather than theoretical. Record a two-minute answer on your phone, play it back, and mark every word where your stress sits somewhere other than the dictionary's. Working through a family at a time — all the -tion words, then all the compound nouns — fixes a pattern instead of one word.
Get it marked
Hear what the examiner hears
IELTS Mentor AI scores Pronunciation as one of the four criteria, alongside fluency and coherence, lexical resource and grammatical range.