Abstract: Hydrodynamic pressure on cylinders would occur during water-cylinder interaction when the cylinders are subjected to earthquake actions. The hydrodynamic pressure on elliptical cylinders was investigated in this study. Firstly, the analytical solution for earthquake induced hydrodynamic pressure on the elliptical cylinder was derived in elliptical coordinate system. Secondly, the proposed analytical solution was verified by the acoustic-structure coupling method in commercial finite element software ABAQUS. The numerical examples indicated that the proposed analytical solutions were in good agreement with the numerical solutions. Thirdly, the influence of water compressibility on hydrodynamic pressure is analyzed quantitatively by introducing dimensionless parameters including the frequency ratio, width-depth ratio and ratio of long to short axis of the ellipse.