സഹായം:IPA for English

The pronunciation of English words in Wikipedia is most often given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (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 Wikipedia: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 /ɒ/ and /ɔː/. In many dialects /r/ occurs only before a vowel; if you speak such a dialect, simply ignore /r/ 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 of fir, fur, and fern in Scottish English, as those distinctions are seldom made in the dictionaries used as sources for Wikipedia articles.

The IPA stress mark (ˈ) 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.