Search French words by phonetic transcription




How to search words by phonetic transcription

You probably already checked out our French phonetic translator. It can convert French words into phonetic transcription automatically.

Sometimes you may need to do the opposite - enter phonetic transcription and find which words match this pronunciation. This tool does exactly that.

You don't need to enter the transcription of the whole word. Submit a piece of transcription and search for all the words containing the combination of phonetic symbols you entered (a maximum of 2000 words will be shown).

Please use the interactive keyboard to enter the phonetic transcription. It contains all the acceptable phonetic symbols. Do not use any other symbols in your query, such as stress marks, for example.

You can use asterisk (*) in the middle of your query to replace one or more phonetic symbols. In English, for example, "b*d" would find "bad", "bed", "bedding", "bid", "bread", etc.

This tool also supports the so called character sets from regular expressions. Here's how they work.

Put in square brackets several phonetic symbols. The algorithm will try to match any character from your set. In English, for example, "b[æɛ]d" will match /bæd/ (bad), /bɛd/ (bed), /bɛdz/ (beds), etc., but not /bɪd/ (bid) or /bɹɛd/ (bread).

Even though your character set may be long - let's say, [iɪɛæuʊɔɑəʌ], it will still be considered as one symbol during the search.

You may want to check our French listening trainer. It can help you learn to distinguish similar sounds in French.