I’ve tried google but I haven’t been getting far
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It’s helpful to know what a diphthong is first.
A diphthong is essentially a ‘glide’ from one vowel to another within one syllable. Consider the word ‘here’. If you slow down the pronunciation and break it down to each unit, you will get
hee-er
But normally you don’t pronounce ‘here’ as two distinct syllables, just one. “here”. Consider your mouth/tongue position. Try pronouncing “here” super slow, you’ll notice that your mouth/tongue’s position is different at the start of the word “hee” (tongue slightly more forward) and the end “er” (tongue further back). Your mouth/tongue slowly transitions from one position to another.
A triphthong is just a diphthong except instead of gliding over two vowels, it glides over three.
Consider the word “fire”. if you break it down and speak super slow, you’ll get
fa-ee-er
Fa. Ee. Er. Now if you say it all really fast, you just get “fire” as one syllable. That’s basically it.
Monopthong = singular sound in a vowel. In English these would be the short vowel sounds you’re familiar with from grade school
Dipthong = two vowels stitched together. The long I sound can be thought of as actually “ah+ee” which is actually how it’s often represented in other languages that don’t have that vowel natively (see Korean or Japanese)
Triphthong = three vowels stitched together. The vowel sound in “hour” is an example. “a+o+oo” slurred together quickly
A diphthong is where you have 2 vowel sounds next to each other such that your mouth moves during the vowel sound. An example would be the word “house.” A triphthong would be the same, but with 3 adjacent vowel sounds. I’m not sure off hand if there are any actual words that have this phenomenon in the English language.
There are some great explanations below, but we can step back a bit further. The vowel sounds you were taught in primary school were not the full story. Whilst written English has five letters we call vowels, it has many more vowel _sounds_.
This can be hard to exaplain in text, so I’m going to link to the famous linguist [Adrian Underhill’s videos](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbEWGLATRxw_2hL5hY164nvHdTpwhEOXC) which introduce “monophthongs” in English with voice but also a diagram. Note that monophthongs can be short (i in hit) or long (ea in heat) but they still count as one sound. Linguists and his diagram have a little symbol for extra long ones that looks a bit like a colon (:). He then goes explains “diphthongs” which are compound vowel sounds made of two monopthongs. “Triphthongs” are simply that but made of _three_ vowel sounds, the most notable in English being the ‘our’ in hour, sour and power (note that these are sounds, not spelling, hence power being included).
The idea of course extends to other languages.
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