French phonetic dictionary 1.0 released

The project is dropped - read why

Usually I don't announce the new releases of the French phonetic dictionary. But this one is special. Two volunteers and I have finished proofreading 10,000 most frequent French words!

The latest version of the dictionary contains 13,154 words. The work moves slowly, but I'm still very happy and grateful. This dictionary greatly improved the quality of the French phonetic transcription translator.

If you follow the news of the project, you remember that I decided to create a tool that shows the phonetic transcription of French words according to the pronunciation rules in French. During the last months I was adding more and more exceptions to the general algorithm and now this tools can predict the phonetic transcription correctly for 96% of regular words (it is not as good for proper nouns though). Since it works very fast, eventually I have plans to rewrite the French phonetic translator, so it would use the phonetic dictionary only for the words that don't follow the regular pronunciation rules.

By the way, for this project we use the French electronic dictionary Antidote as a reference. Antidote is regularly updated and follows closely the latest changes in the French language. As such, you may notice that in our dictionary the phonetic symbol [œ̃] is replaced by the symbol [ɛ̃] and the closed [ɑ] is almost always replaced by an open [a].

And I still invite everybody to take part in this project – it is really not complicated and you can improve your French at the same time!

Tags: French, phonetic dictionary, French phonetics, French pronunciation, phonetic transcription, IPA