Wikipedia:IPA for English
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The pronunciation of English words in Wikipedia is most often given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The goal is that interpretation should not depend on the reader's dialect, and therefore a broad transcription is generally used.
For a more complete key to the IPA, which covers sounds that do not occur in English, see Wikipedia:IPA.
Since this key accommodates standard American, British, and Australian pronunciations, not all of the distinctions shown here will be relevant to your dialect. If, for example, you pronounce cot and caught the same, you can ignore the difference between the symbols /ɒ/ and /ɔː/. In many dialects /r/ occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore /r/ in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it.
On the other hand, this key does not encode the difference between the vowels of bad and lad in Australian English, nor between those of fir, fur, and fern in Scottish English, as those distinctions are seldom made in the dictionaries used as sources for Wikipedia articles.
The IPA stress mark (ˈ) comes before the syllable that has the stress, in contrast to some other methods of describing pronunciation used in English dictionaries.
For a more precise use of the IPA to illustrate differences between English dialects, to transcribe languages other than English, or if the IPA symbols are not displayed on your browser, see the links in the box to the right and at the bottom of this page.
Key
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Notes
- ^ If the two characters ɡ and
do not match, if the first looks like a γ, then you have an issue with your default font. See Rendering issues. - ^ Although the IPA symbol [r] represents a trill, /r/ is widely used instead of /ɹ/ in broad transcriptions of English.
- ^ /hw/ is not distinguished from /w/ in dialects with the wine-whine merger, such as RP and most varieties of GenAm.
- ^ A number of English words, such as genre and garage, are pronounced with either /ʒ/ or /dʒ/.
- ^ In most dialects, /x/ is replaced by /k/ in loch and by /h/ in Chanukah.
- ^ Most people pronounce the English word Hawaii without the /ʔ/ (glottal stop) that occurs in the Hawaiian word Hawai‘i.
- ^ In non-rhotic accents such as RP, /r/ not pronounced unless followed by a vowel. In Wikipedia articles, /ɪər/ etc. are not always distinguished from /ɪr/ etc. When they are, the long vowels may be transcribed /iːr/ etc. by analogy with vowels not followed by /r/.
- ^ /ɒ/ is not distinguished from /ɑː/ in dialects with the father-bother merger such as GenAm.
- ^ /ɔː/ is not distinguished from /ɑː/ (except before /r/) in dialects with the cot-caught merger such as some varieties of GenAm.
- ^ Commonly transcribed /əʊ/ or /oː/.
- ^ /ɔər/ is not distinguished from /ɔr/ in dialects with the horse-hoarse merger, which include most dialects of modern English.
- ^ /ʊər/ is not distinguished from /ɔr/ in dialects with the pour-poor merger, including many younger speakers.
- ^ a b In some articles these are transcribed /ɝː/ and /ɚ/ when not followed by a vowel.
- ^ In many dialects, /juː/ is pronounced the same as /uː/ after "tongue sounds" (/t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, /θ/, and /l/), so that dew /djuː/ is pronounced the same as do /duː/.
- ^ Pronounced /iː/ in dialects with the happy tensing, /ɪ/ in other dialects. British convention used to transcribe it with /ɪ/, but the OED and other influential dictionaries recently converted to /i/.
- ^ Pronounced [ə] in Australian and many US dialects, and [ɪ] in Received Pronunciation. Many speakers freely alternate between a reduced [ɪ̈] and a reduced [ə]. Many phoneticians (vd. Olive & Greenwood 1993:322) and the OED uses the pseudo-IPA symbol
ɪ[1], and Merriam Webster uses ə̇. - ^ Pronounced [ʊ] in many dialects, [ə] in others. Many speakers freely alternate between a reduced [ʊ̈] and a reduced [ə]. The OED uses the pseudo-IPA symbol
ʊ[2]. - ^ Pronounced [ə] in many dialects, and [ɵw] or [əw] before another vowel, as in cooperate. Sometimes pronounced as a full /oʊ/, especially in careful speech. (Bolinger 1989)
- ^ It is arguable that there is no phonemic distinction in English between primary and secondary stress (vd. Ladefoged 1993), but it is conventional to notate them as here.
- ^ Full vowels after a stressed syllable, such as the ship in battleship, are marked with secondary stress in some dictionaries (Merriam-Webster), but not in others (the OED). Such syllables are not actually stressed.
- ^ Syllables are indicated sparingly, where necessary to avoid confusion.
See also
- To compare these symbols with dictionary conventions you may be more familiar with, see pronunciation respelling for English, which lists the pronunciation guides of fourteen English dictionaries.
- For differences among national dialects of English, see the IPA chart for English dialects, which compares the vowels of Received Pronunciation, General American, Australian English, New Zealand English, and Scottish English, among others.
- For use of the IPA in other languages, see help:IPA for a quick overview, or the more detailed main IPA article.
- If your browser does not display IPA symbols, you probably need to install a font that includes the IPA. Good free IPA fonts include Gentium (prettier) and Charis SIL (more complete); download links can be found on those pages.
- For a guide to adding pronunciations to Wikipedia articles, see the documentation for the IPA template.
- For help on getting the screen reader JAWS to read IPA symbols, see Getting JAWS 6.1 to recognize "exotic" Unicode symbols.
