Oxford Dictionary Words Pronunciation
Placido Teofilo
The broad approach to transcription is accompanied by a selective approach to variant pronunciations. For example, the transcriptions make clear that the vowel /ɒ/ occurs only in British English, with American pronunciations usually having /ɔː/ or /ɑː/ instead. For these words there is some variation between /ɔː/ and /ɑː/ among speakers of American English, but only one such pronunciation is given.
Further information about a pronunciation may be given in square brackets [ˈlaɪk ˈɪs], referring more specifically to sounds on the IPA chart. This narrow transcription is useful for representing pronunciations or sounds that are not British or American, for example the East African pronunciation [ˈboma] given at boma.
Allophones can be demonstrated by looking at the /t/ phoneme. In addition to [t], the /t/ phoneme also contains tap [ɾ] and glottal stop [ʔ] sounds, which are used in certain contexts. The [ɾ] tap sound is very much like the /d/ in rider. It is widely used by American speakers when the /t/ is between two vowels and the second vowel is not stressed, as in writer. Both British and American speakers sometimes use the glottal stop [ʔ] (a momentary tight closure of the vocal cords) for the /t/ in words like football /ˈfʊtbɔːl/ and button /ˈbʌtn/. Use of the glottal stop for /t/ in these positions is more common and more widely accepted than its use between vowels, as in water.
Such considerations are not limited to the /t/ phoneme. For example, the /l/ phoneme encompasses a clear [l] sound for words such as like /laɪk/ (where the /l/ is before or between vowels) and a dark [ɫ] sound for other positions, as in full /fʊl/ or milk /mɪlk/. The sound files that accompany our phonemic transcriptions are intended to supplement the phonemic transcriptions and demonstrate such detail.
Some pronunciations are labelled as strong or weak forms. The first pronunciation given usually represents the one most commonly used, but where a strong form is indicated it should be used when the word is stressed. A strong form is also usually used when the word is at the end of a sentence. For example:
Longer transcriptions may have one or more secondary stresses before the main stress. These are marked with /ˌ/ as in abbreviation /əˌbriːviˈeɪʃn/ and agricultural /ˌɡrɪˈkʌltʃərəl/. They feel like beats in a rhythm leading up to the main stress. Weak stresses after the main stress can sometimes be heard, but they are not marked in our dictionaries.
A word or compound that has two stresses in its dictionary form may show a shift of stress when used in a phrase. For example, the adjective ˌwell-ˈknown has the main stress on known, but in the phrase ˌwell-known ˈauthor the main stress is shifted to the noun that follows.
No other dictionary matches M-W's accuracy and scholarship in defining word meanings. Our pronunciation help, synonyms, usage and grammar tips set the standard. Go beyond dictionary lookups with Word of the Day, facts and observations on language, lookup trends, and wordplay from the editors at Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation).
Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. They are used there because it is not possible to predict with certainty the sound of a written English word from its spelling or the spelling of a spoken English word from its sound. So readers looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary may find, on seeing the pronunciation respelling, that the word is in fact already known to them orally. By the same token, those who hear an unfamiliar spoken word may see several possible matches in a dictionary and must rely on the pronunciation respellings to find the correct match.[4]
Traditional respelling systems for English use only the 26 ordinary letters of the Latin alphabet with diacritics, and are meant to be easy for native readers to understand. English dictionaries have used various such respelling systems to convey phonemic representations of the spoken word since Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the earliest being devised by James Buchanan us be featured in his 1757 dictionary Lingu Britannic Vera Pronunciatio,[5] although most words therein were not respelled but given diacritics;[6] since the language described by Buchanan was that of Scotland, William Kenrick responded in 1773 with A New Dictionary of the English Language, wherein the pronunciation of Southern England was covered and numbers rather than diacritics used to represent vowel sounds;[7] Thomas Sheridan devised a simpler scheme, which he employed in his successful 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language, a much larger work consisting of two volumes;[8][9] in 1791 John Walker produced A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, which achieved a great reputation and ran into some forty editions.[10][11] Today, such systems remain in use in American dictionaries for native English speakers,[12] but they have been replaced by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in linguistics references and many bilingual dictionaries published outside the United States.[13]
The pronunciation which dictionaries refer to is some chosen "normal" one, thereby excluding other regional accents or dialect pronunciation. In England this standard is normally the Received Pronunciation, based upon the educated speech of southern England. The standard for American English is known as General American (GA).
Sophisticated phonetic systems have been developed, such as James Murray's scheme for the original Oxford English Dictionary, and the IPA, which replaced it in later editions and has been adopted by many British and international dictionaries. The IPA system is not a respelling system, because it uses symbols not in the English alphabet, such as and θ. Most current British dictionaries[14] use IPA for this purpose.
The following chart matches the IPA symbols used to represent the sounds of the English language with the phonetic symbols used in several dictionaries, a majority of which transcribe American English.
These works adhere (for the most part) to the one-symbol-per-sound principle. Other works not included here, such as Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged, 2nd ed.), do not adhere and thus have several different symbols for the same sound (partly to allow for different phonemic mergers and splits).
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1st through 4th edition, used a mix of two systems.[18] Some editions of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary have offered a method for teachers to indicate pronunciation without respelling as a supplement to the respelling scheme used in the dictionary. Pronunciation without respelling is also sometimes used in texts with many unusual words, such as Bibles,[19][20][21] when it is desirable to show the received pronunciation. These will often be more exhaustive than dictionary respelling keys because all possible digraphs or readings need to have a unique spelling.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardized method of phonetic transcription developed by a group of English and French language teachers in 1888. In the beginning, only specialized pronunciation dictionaries for linguists used it, for example, the English Pronouncing Dictionary edited by Daniel Jones (EPD, 1917). The IPA, used by English teachers as well, started to appear in popular dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (1948) and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1978).
IPA is very flexible and allows for a wide variety of transcriptions between broad phonemic transcriptions which describe the significant units of meaning in language and phonetic transcriptions which may indicate every nuance of sound in detail.
The IPA transcription conventions used in the first twelve editions of the EPD was relatively simple, using a quantitative system indicating vowel length using a colon, and requiring the reader to infer other vowel qualities. Many phoneticians preferred a qualitative system, which used different symbols to indicate vowel timbre and colour. A. C. Gimson introduced a quantitative-qualitative IPA notation system when he took over editorship of the EPD (13th edition, 1967); and by the 1990s, the Gimson system had become the de facto standard for phonetic notation of British Received Pronunciation (RP).
While IPA has not been adopted by popular dictionaries in the United States,[citation needed] there is a demand for learner's dictionaries which provide both British and American English pronunciation. Some dictionaries, such as the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English provide a separate transcription for each.
British and American English dialects have a similar set of phonemes, but some are pronounced differently; in technical parlance, they consist of different phones. Although developed for RP, the Gimson system being phonemic, it is not far from much of General American pronunciation as well. A number of recent dictionaries, such as the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, add a few non-phonemic symbols /ʳ i u ᵊl ᵊn/ to represent both RP and General American pronunciation in a single IPA transcription.
Clive Upton updated the Gimson scheme, changing the symbols used for five vowels. He served as pronunciation consultant for the influential Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which adopted this scheme in its ninth edition (1995). Upton's reform is controversial: it reflects changing pronunciation, but critics say it represents a narrower regional accent, and abandons parallelism with American and Australian English. In addition, the phonetician John C. Wells said that he could not understand why Upton had altered the presentation of price to prʌɪs.[23]
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