Help:IPA for English

Throughout Wikipedia, the pronunciation of words is indicated by means of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The following tables list the IPA symbols used for English words and pronunciations.

If the IPA symbols are not displayed properly by your browser, see the links below.

Key
If the words illustrating two symbols sound the same to you (say, if you pronounce cot and caught the same, or do and dew, or marry and merry), you can ignore the difference between those symbols. Footnotes explain some of these mergers. (See also below.)


 * Notes
 * The IPA stress mark comes before the syllable that has the stress, in contrast to stress marking in pronunciation keys of some dictionaries published in the United States.
 * Words in are the standard lexical sets. Words in the lexical sets  and  are given two transcriptions, respectively one with  and one with, and with  and.

Dialect variation
This key represents diaphonemes, abstractions of speech sounds that accommodate General American, Received Pronunciation, Canadian English, South African, Australian, and New Zealand pronunciations. Therefore, not all of the distinctions shown here are relevant to a particular dialect:


 * If, for example, you pronounce cot and caught  the same, then you may simply ignore the difference between the symbols  and, just as you ignore the distinction between the written vowels o and au when pronouncing them.
 * In many dialects, occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore  in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it, as in cart.
 * In other dialects, (yes) cannot occur after, etc., within the same syllable; if you speak such a dialect, then ignore the  in transcriptions such as new . For example, New York is transcribed . For most people from England and for some New Yorkers, the  in  is not pronounced (and may instead rhotacise the preceding vowel); for most people from the United States, including some New Yorkers, the  in  is not pronounced and may be ignored.

On the other hand, there are some distinctions which you might make but which this key does not encode, as they are seldom reflected in the dictionaries used as sources for Wikipedia articles:


 * The difference between the vowels of fir, fur and fern, maintained in Scottish and Irish English but lost elsewhere.
 * The difference between the vowels of "pain" and "pane" found in some English, Welsh, and Newfoundland dialects.
 * The vowels of bad and had, distinguished in many parts of Australia and the Eastern United States.
 * The vowels of spider and spied her, distinguished in some parts of Scotland and North America.

Other words may have different vowels depending on the speaker. Bath, for example, originally had the vowel (as in cat), but for many speakers, it now has the  vowel (as in father). Such words are transcribed twice, once for each pronunciation:.

For more extensive information on dialect variations, you may wish to see the IPA chart for English dialects.

Other transcriptions
If you feel it is necessary to add a pronunciation respelling using another convention, then please use the conventions of Wikipedia's pronunciation respelling key.


 * To compare the following IPA symbols with non-IPA American dictionary conventions that may be more familiar, see pronunciation respelling for English, which lists the pronunciation guides of fourteen English dictionaries published in the United States.
 * To compare the following IPA symbols with other IPA conventions that may be more familiar, see Help:IPA conventions for English, which lists the conventions of eight English dictionaries published in Britain, Australia, and the United States.