Double consonants (le doppie) in Italian: State attenti!

Parola del giorno

A reader emailed me recently asking if I could remind students and speakers of Italian to be cautious with words with double consonants. This problem always crops up around the start of the new year as students of Italian are always curious about how they can express Happy New Year in Italian (which gets to the anno/ano problem — read on!).

Italian can be a tricky language to learn and even trickier to speak, and there are a number of situations where the meaning of a word changes when the consonants of a word double.

Here are some prominent examples to be cautious of: