Help:IPA for English

For a more complete key to the IPA, which covers sounds that do not occur in English, see Help:IPA.

Since this key accommodates 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 and. 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.

On the other hand, this key does not encode the difference between the vowels of bad and lad in Australian English, nor between those in fir, fur, and fern in Scottish English, as those distinctions are seldom made in Wikipedia articles.

The IPA stress mark comes before the syllable that has the stress, in contrast to some other methods of describing pronunciation used in English dictionaries.

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 in the box to the right and at the bottom of this page.