Rules of Spanish Stress

Many Spanish words have penultimate stress. This is the case with uno (one), cuatro (four) and cinco (five). However, many words are stressed differently.

Spanish has two important rules for stress. They are:

1) If a word ends in a vowel or in n and s, the penultimate syllable is stressed.

2) If a word ends with a consonant other than n or s, the final syllable is stressed.

Accent marks are used to indicate stress in words which do not follow the two stress rules. For example, the word sábado (Saturday) has antepenultimate stress. An accent mark is placed over the first vowel to indicate stress.

Accent marks are also used to distinguish words which have different meanings but are pronounced and spelled identically. These words can be called homonyms. Examples include mi (my) and mí (me), el (the) and él (he), and si (if) and sí (yes). 

Accent marks in Spanish are used to indicate the stress of words which do not follow the two stress rules. For words which follow the stress rules, no accent is needed. However, accents are also used for words which are spelled and pronounced the same but have different meanings. The use of accent marks is an important part of Spanish orthography.