Help:IPA/English

Throughout FAMEPedia, 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. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to FAMEPedia and differ from those used by dictionaries.

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

If you are adding a pronunciation using this key, such pronunciations should generally be formatted using the template IPAc-en. The template provides tooltips for each symbol in the pronunciation. See the template page for instructions.

Key
If there is an IPA symbol you are looking for that you do not see here, see Help:IPA, which is a more complete list. For a table listing all spellings of the sounds on this page, see. For help converting spelling to pronunciation, see.

The words given as examples for two different symbols may sound the same to you. For example, you may pronounce cot and caught the same, do and dew, or marry and merry. This often happens because of dialect variation (see our articles English phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects). If this is the case, you will pronounce those symbols the same for other words as well. Whether this is true for all words, or just when the sounds occur in the same context, depends on the merger. The footnotes explain some of these cases.

Notes
 * Words in are the standard lexical sets.
 * The length mark ⟨ː⟩ does not mean that the vowels transcribed with it are always longer than those without it. When unstressed, followed by a voiceless consonant, or in a polysyllabic word, a vowel in the former group is frequently shorter than the latter in other environments (see ).

Dialect variation
This key represents diaphonemes, abstractions of speech sounds that accommodate General American, Received Pronunciation (RP) and to a large extent also Australian, Canadian, Irish (including Ulster), New Zealand, Scottish, South African and Welsh pronunciations. Therefore, not all of the distinctions shown here are relevant to a particular dialect:
 * ⟨i⟩ does not represent a phoneme but a variation between and  in unstressed positions. Speakers of dialects with happy tensing (Australian English, General American, modern RP) should read it as an unstressed, whereas speakers of other dialects (e.g. some Northern England English) should treat it the same as . In Scotland, this vowel can be considered the same as the short allophone of , as in take. Before  within the same word, another possible pronunciation is  as in yet.
 * Many speakers of American and Canadian English pronounce cot and caught  the same. 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.
 * Speakers of rhotic dialects (Irish English, North American English, Scottish English) do not distinguish between the vowels of near, cure and square  on the one hand and freerunning , Q-rating  and dayroom  on the other. If you speak such a dialect, read  as.
 * In Northern Ireland, Scotland and many North American dialects the distinction between as in courier and the aforementioned  and  does not exist. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between,  and.
 * In Northern Ireland and Scotland this merger occurs in all environments, which means that foot and goose  also have the same vowel. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between  and  in all contexts.
 * In North America, the of courier and the  of cure may instead merge with  as in north or  as in nurse. No such merger is possible in the case of the sequence which we transcribe as  as there is an implied morpheme boundary after the length mark.
 * In North American dialects that do not distinguish between, and  there is also no distinction between the  of mirror and the aforementioned  and . If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between ,  and.
 * In many North American dialects there is also no distinction between the vowels in merry, Mary and marry . If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between ,  and . Some speakers keep marry and/or merry separate from the rest, but in the General American accent all three vowels are the same and may not be distinct from  as in dayroom.
 * In rhotic North American English there is no distinction between the vowels in nurse and letter . If you speak such a dialect, read  as . The  of hurry often joins this neutralization; if you have it in your speech, read,  and  as.
 * Some speakers from Northern England do not distinguish the vowel of square and nurse . If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols  and.
 * In New Zealand English, the vowels of kit and focus  have the same schwa-like quality. If you are from New Zealand, ignore the difference between the symbols  and.
 * In contemporary New Zealand English and some other dialects, the vowels of near and square  are not distinguished. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols  and.
 * In Northern England English, the vowels of foot and strut  are not distinguished. If you are from Northern England, ignore the difference between the symbols  and.
 * In Welsh English and some other dialects, the vowels of unorthodoxy and an orthodoxy  are not distinguished. If you speak such a dialect, ignore the difference between the symbols  and.
 * Depending on the dialect, vowels can be subject to various mergers before, so that e.g. fill and feel  or pull  and pool  may not be distinguished. L-vocalization may trigger even more mergers, so that e.g. cord  and called  may be homophonous as  in non-rhotic dialects of South East England. See English-language vowel changes before historic /l/ for more information.
 * 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; for most people from the United States, including some New Yorkers, the  in  is not pronounced and may be ignored. (See yod-dropping.)

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 FAMEPedia articles:
 * The vowels of kit and bit, distinguished in South Africa. Both of them are transcribed as in stressed syllables and as  or  in unstressed syllables.
 * The difference between the vowels of fir, fur and fern, maintained in some Scottish and Irish English but lost elsewhere. All of them are transcribed as.
 * The vowels of north and force, distinguished in Scottish English, Irish English and by a minority of American speakers. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The vowels of pause and paws, distinguished in Cockney and by some Estuary English speakers. Both of them are transcribed as when the spelling does not contain $⟨r⟩$ and  or  (depending on the word) when it does.
 * The vowels of manning and Manning, distinguished in some parts of the United States (see raising). Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The difference between the vowels of pain and pane found in some English, Welsh, and Newfoundland dialects. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The difference between the vowels of holy and wholly found in Cockney and many Estuary English speakers. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * Any allophonic distinctions, such as:
 * The vowels of bad and lad, distinguished in many parts of Australia. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The vowels of spider and spied her, distinguished in many parts of Scotland, plus many parts of North America. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The vowels of rider and writer, distinguished in most parts of Canada and many parts of the United States. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * The vowels of powder and pouter distinguished in most parts of Canada and some parts of the United States. Both of them are transcribed as.
 * Allophonic vowel length (including the Scottish vowel length rule), as in knife vs. knives . Phonemic vowel length, which exists in some dialects and involves pairs such as  vs.  and  vs.  is also not marked explicitly.  and  do not represent phonemes; see above.
 * Flapping in words such as better, which we write, rather than.
 * Glottalization in words such as jetlag and, in some accents, daughter, which we write and, rather than  and . In this system,  is used only for paralanguage or in loanwords where it occurs phonemically in the original language.
 * L-vocalization in words such as bottle and Alps, which we write and, rather than  and.
 * The difference between allophones of in balance  vs. the ones in about and Russia (and, in non-rhotic dialects, better), both of which may be closer to  in dialects with the foot-strut split (that is, ) vs. the one in button (the syllabicity of the following consonant). All are transcribed as  in our system.
 * The difference between the phonetic realization of English sounds (mostly vowels) in various dialects. Let's pick some grapes for Betty should be transcribed regardless of the variety of English and everyone should interpret that transcription according to their own dialect. Thus, a person from South East England will read it as something like, a Scot as , whereas someone from New Zealand will interpret that transcription as . Because we are transcribing diaphonemes rather than phones (actual sounds), it is irrelevant that, for example, the vowel in let's as pronounced by someone from New Zealand overlaps with how people with England and Scotland typically pronounce the first vowel in pick, or that the Scottish realization of  after  overlaps with the New Zealand realization of  between vowels. In other words, the symbol ⟨ɛ⟩ does not stand specifically for the open-mid front unrounded vowel in our system but any vowel that can be identified as the vowel in let's, depending on the accent. This is also why we use the simple symbol ⟨r⟩ for the second sound in grapes.

Other words may have different vowels depending on the speaker.

The pronunciation of the vowel in most dialects of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Northern England and Wales has always been closer to. Received Pronunciation has moved away from the traditional near-open front realization towards almost fully open front realization, and both the Oxford English Dictionary and the 2014 edition of Gimson's Pronunciation of English transcribe the vowel in lad, bad, cat, trap with.

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

Note that place names are not generally exempted from being transcribed in this abstracted system, so rules such as the above must be applied in order to recover the local pronunciation. Examples include place names in much of England ending &#8209;ford, which although locally pronounced are transcribed. This is best practice for editors. However, readers should be aware that not all editors may have followed this consistently, so for example if is encountered for such a place name, it should not be interpreted as a claim that the  would be absent even in a rhotic dialect.

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