Help:Pronunciation
You don't need to be Editor-In-Chief to add or edit content to WikiDoc. You can begin to add to or edit text on this WikiDoc page by clicking on the edit button at the top of this page. Next enter or edit the information that you would like to appear here. Once you are done editing, scroll down and click the Save page button at the bottom of the page.
Pronunciation of English words in Wikipedia is most often given in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or 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 Help:IPA.
Since this key covers 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/. Again, in many dialects /r/ only occurs before a vowel; if you do this, simply ignore /r/ in the pronunciation guides where you would not pronounce it. It is not necessary to give multiple transcriptions for such variation.
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 at the bottom of this page.
Key
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Notes
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 between the national dialects of English, see International Phonetic Alphabet for English, which compares the vowels of Received Pronunciation, General American, and General Australian.
- For use of the IPA in other languages, see Help:IPA for a quick overview, or the detailed IPA article.
- If your browser does not display these symbols, you probably need to install a font that includes the IPA. A good free IPA font is Gentium; download links can be found on that page.
