English Phonetic Spelling and IPA Phonetic Transcription

more than 110,000 carefully proofread transcriptions

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     phonetics → /fəˈnɛtɪks/

     phonetics → /fuh-nEt-iks/

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Number of words in our English pronunciation dictionary

Mike American English 20,000 words
          
Lela American English 10,000 words
          
Jeevin American English 3,700 words
       

        
Andrew British English 6,000 words
          

 

 

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Phonetic Transcription Can Help You Improve Your English Pronunciation

English pronunciation can be very confusing. As you know, there are no strict pronunciation rules in the English language, so if you see an unknown English word, you will not know how to pronounce it. The same English letter, or combination of letters, can be pronounced differently in different words. Moreover, the same English word can be pronounced in different ways by native English speakers from different countries, or even from the same country! That makes the English language hard to learn and understand.

This online translator allows you to convert English text to phonetic transcription using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. If you want to see the phonemic transcription, click on Show advanced options - some of the options should be unchecked.

If you are a native English speaker and are not familiar with International Phonetic Alphabet, you may want to choose the option Convert to phonetic spelling.

This tool will serve as an English pronunciation guide and help you save time. You will no longer need to look up the pronunciation of a word in a dictionary. If you use the phonetic transcription regularly in combination with English audio and video recordings, your pronunciation and listening skills in the English language will improve.

In order to help you train your speech organs, we created online pronunciation trainers:

They allow you to practice the pronunciation of the most frequent English words, set the playback speed and the number of times each word will be repeated.

Another great way to improve your American English pronunciation is to use our American English video vocabulary builder. It is designed for beginners and has English subtitles for all lessons, including phonetic transcription.

Homographs (words that are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently and have different meanings) are highlighted in light green. If you hover your cursor over these words or tap them on your mobile device, you will see all the possible pronunciations. You may also see the part of speech for each word.

Pronunciation variants (when native speakers from different regions pronounce a word differently, or when the pronunciation changes during rapid speech) are highlighted in light blue. You can also hover your cursor to see all possible variants.

This phonetic translator supports two most common English dialects:

  1. Our British English pronunciation dictionary is compiled from miscellaneous sources. It contains more than 110,000 words. The homographs (more than 1,000 words) and pronunciation variants (more than 4,000 words) are fully supported in this dictionary.
  2. Our American English pronunciation dictionary is also compiled from miscellaneous sources. It contains more than 140,000 modified word forms. Homographs (300 words) and pronunciation variants (more than 500 words) are supported.

To develop this translator, we used information from the online resources listed below and other sources. The phonetic transcription was taken from these sources in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada (Paragraph 29, Fair Dealing for the purpose of education).

Highlighting High-Frequency English Words

A special option allows you to highlight high-frequency English words. You can choose between two frequency lists:

  • The frequency word list based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English
  • The subtitle-based frequency word list

The words from different frequency intervals will be highlighted in the following colors:

1-10001001-20002001-30003001-40004001-5000

If you want to make a frequency analysis of your text and obtain detailed statistics, please use the English word frequency counter.

Built-in English dictionary

This phonetic translator has a built-in English dictionary, WordNet. After submitting your text, click on any word in the results to see its definition. This function only works if the transcription display above each word is enabled (this is the default option).

You can also create your own custom word lists. For that, after you submitted your text, click on any word and then click the button "+ to word list". You will be prompted to enter the meaning/translation (which is optional) and select the transcription. Once you finished adding words to your word list, you can export it into file (Word, Excel, plain text).

American English and Merriam-Webster's Dictionaries

Although we used multiple sources to create this phonetic translator, when it comes to American English we always use Merriam-Webster dictionaries to confirm the correct pronunciation. Their Advanced Learner's Dictionary is one of the best that we have ever seen.

We also highly recommend their products for mobile devices:

Check our English phonetic subtitle converter and obtain something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

Alphabetical list of all words with audio or video recordings

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