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. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to Wikipedia 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 the words given as examples for two different symbols sound the same to you (for example, if you pronounce cot and caught the same, or do and dew, or marry and merry), you can pronounce those symbols the same in explanations of all words. The footnotes explain some of these mergers. (See also Dialect variation below.)

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.

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  may be given two transcriptions, either with  and, or with and , respectively.

Dialect variation
This key represents diaphonemes, abstractions of speech sounds that accommodate General American (GenAm), Received Pronunciation (RP), 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; 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 Scotland and some parts of North America.

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. BBC English 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 [&#8209;fəd] are transcribed /&#8209;fərd/. This is best practice for editors. However, readers should be aware that not all editors may have followed this consistently, so for example if /&#8209;fəd/ is encountered for such a place name, it should not be interpreted as a claim that the /r/ 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 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.