What is this?

How do you say it in Italian?

Cos’è?

Cos’è? is how you most commonly say what is this in Italian.

For example, you can say…

Cos’è? – È un pallone da calcio.
What it this? – It is a soccer ball.

Cos’è? – È una farfalla.
What it this? – It is a butterfly.

In colloquial language, cosa is often shortened to cos’, with an apostrophe, when it directly precedes a verb beginning with a vowel. You could also ask cosa è, but this is very formal and it’s only ever found in purple prose.

Cos’è questo?

Instead of just cos’è?, the question what is this in Italian can also be rendered as cos’è questo?, literally translating to what is this?.

Both questions are fully interchangeable and can also translate the English sentence what is it?.

For example, you can say…

Cos’è questo? – Non lo so.
What is this? – I don’t know.

Cos’è questo animale? – È uno scoiattolo.
What is this animal? – It’s a squirrel.

Cosa sono? Cosa sono questi?

If this points to a group of objects, you can also ask what is this in Italian with either cosa sono? or cosa sono questi?.

Sono, as you maybe remember thanks to the conjugation table you’ve seen in one of the previous paragraphs, is a present tense conjugation of the verb essere, namely for the third person pronoun loro, they.

Cosa sono? – Sono delle foglie di menta.
What are these? – They are mint leaves.

Cosa sono questi? – Sono dei biscotti.
What are these? – They are cookies.

In Italian, you don’t usually repeat questo or questi in your answer, which is the equivalent for this and these for masculine nouns. You can of course say questi sono… if you want to stress the concept, as in…

Questi sono dei libri. Questi, invece, sono dei fogli.
These are books. These, on the other hand, are papers.

If you are just addressing an object, you will almost always leave out the pronoun and begin the sentence with the verb. You can do without the pronouns because Italian verb conjugations are different for each subject pronoun, so there’s no way you can misunderstand the subject!

People don’t normally ask what is this in Italian using a feminine pronoun, but for the sake of completeness, here are the feminine forms of all the questions we’ve covered:

For example, you can say…

Cos’è questa? – È una finestra.
What is this? – It’s a window.

Cosa sono queste? – Queste sono delle case.
What are these? – These are houses.

Did you know? Cos’è? is also a song from the movie The Nightmare before Christmas! Here you can listen to the Italian dubbing by the famous Italian singer Renato Zero.

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