English Phonetic Spelling Generator. IPA Transcription. (2024)

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How to use this English IPA translator and pronunciation generator

Introduction

This phonetic translator will help you obtain very accurate phonetic transcription of your English text.

It uses the symbols of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) — the most popular phonetic transcription system in the world.

In addition to IPA, this tool also supports several types of phonetic spelling.

This phonetic translator supports three most common English dialects: British, American and Australian. The number of English words for each dialect in our database is indicated in the following table:

The numbers in the table don't include modified word forms. For example, the words "translate", "translates", "translating" and "translated" are all counted as one word.

The pronunciation of each word in the database was manually checked by a member of our team.

If you need to copy the phonetic transcription into another program or print it, please read our FAQ.

Watch a tutorial "How to convert text to phonetic transcription and listen to audio recordings of words"

High-quality computer-generated audio

You can easily create audio for your text using this pronunciation generator. Listen to the voice samples below.

Text-to-speech service is provided by the following companies:

• Google
• Amazon
• Microsoft

Each time you generate an audio, we have to pay one of these companies.

Text-to-speech service is only available with the subscription Premium.

Audio and video recordings of real people (native English speakers)

We hired professional voice-over artists to record the correct pronunciation of the most popular English words. The number of the audio recordings is indicated in the following table. Click the buttons to listen to the sample words.

Find more sample words in our interactive IPA chart for English.

Number of audio recordings in our English pronunciation generator

Mike	American English	20,000 words
Mike
Lela	American English	10,000 words
Lela
Jeevin	American English	3,700 words
Jeevin Jeevin
Andrew	British English	9,400 words
Andrew

Audio recordings of real people are available with the subscriptions Basic and Premium.

Video recordings of real people are only available with the subscription Premium.

Multiple pronunciations of English words

Some English words are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently and have different meanings. They are called hom*ographs. Compare:

The phonetic translator will highlight hom*ographs in green. If you hover your cursor over these words or tap them on your mobile device, you will see all possible pronunciations.

At the moment this phonetic translator cannot yet decide which pronunciation is correct for such words. You will need to choose the correct pronunciation yourself depending on the context.

Pronunciation variants (when native speakers from different regions pronounce a word differently, or when the pronunciation changes in rapid speech) are highlighted in blue. Just like with hom*ographs, you can also hover your cursor over the word to see all possible variants or click/tap it to select the right pronunciation.

Translation to your native language

This pronunciation generator allows you to obtain an automatic translation of your text to your native language.

Automatic translation service is provided by a third-party company (Google). Each time you translate text into another language, we have to pay Google a small fee.

Translation service is only available with the subscription Premium.

Built-in English dictionary

This phonetic translator has a built-in English dictionary, WordNet. It contains more than 140,000 English words.

Here's what you need to do to activate the dictionary:

1. For the setting Transcription display options select the option "transcription above each word".
2. In the section Choose what you will see when you click the word turn on the option "Word's meaning".
3. After submitting your text, click on any word in the results to see its definition.

Create your own custom word lists

You can create your own custom word lists using this phonetic translator. Here's how you can do it:

1. For the setting Transcription display options select the option "transcription above each word".
2. In the section Choose what you will see when you click the word turn on the option " to word list".
3. After submitting your text, click on the word you want to add to the word list and then click the button " to word list".
4. You will be prompted to select the transcription and enter the meaning/translation of the word (the latter for most languages is optional).
5. Once you finished adding words to your word list, click on My Account at the top of the page and then on My word lists. You will see the list of all your word lists.

There are so many things you can do with your word list:

1. export it to a file (Word, Excel, plain text),
2. print it from your browser,
3. share it with other people (for example, your students),
4. practice pronunciation of every word using the audio recordings of real people (if available) or high-quality text-to-speech voices.

Watch a tutorial "How to create custom word lists"

Broad and narrow transcription

For American English this phonetic translator can show both broad (phonemic) and narrow transcriptions. Please read here about phonemes and allophones to decide which type of transcription you need.

Case-sensitive converter

We wanted to create a very precise tool, so we decided to make this phonetic converter case-sensitive. For some words, it makes a difference. For example, the English words August and august mean different things and may be pronounced differently depending on the context.

If you want to obtain the best results, please submit the English text which is spelled correctly. Misspelling the words (english, ENGLISH) may give unpredictable results.

How to use the setting "Edit transcription"

Sometimes you may encounter one of the following situations:

1. A very rare word was not converted at all.
2. You want to suggest a better transcription for a word.

In either case here's what you can do:

1. For the setting Transcription display options select the option "transcription above each word".
2. In the section Choose what you will see when you click the word turn on the option "Edit transcription".
3. After submitting your text, click on the word which transcription you want to correct and then click the button Edit transcription.
4. If you are suggesting a different transcription for a word that can already be converted, there's one additional step. Go to My Account. Click on Customize my experience and turn on the option I want to suggest changes in the transcription for the words that can already be converted.

In any case, the new transcription will only be visible to yourself. We will add an option to see the transcriptions submitted by other users later.

How to use the setting "Hide transcription"

Some people prefer to hide the phonetic transcription of the most common words in order to make the text less cluttered. Here's how you can do it:

1. For the setting Transcription display options select the option "transcription above each word".
2. In the section Choose what you will see when you click the word turn on the option "Hide transcription".
3. After submitting your text, click on the word which transcription you want to hide and then click the button Hide transcription.

Next time you submit the text, the transcription of this word will not be displayed.

If you want to undo this action, go to My Account. Click on Customize my experience and go to the section Undo the action Hide transcription.

Highlighting of high-frequency English words

In the section Advanced options you will find a special option that allows you to highlight high-frequency English words. The words from different frequency intervals will be highlighted in the following colors:

If you want to make the frequency analysis of your text and obtain the detailed statistics, please use English word frequency counter.

You can choose one of the two frequency lists:

• The frequency word list based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English
• The subtitle-based frequency word list

Learning English as second language: phonetic transcription can help you improve your English pronunciation

English pronunciation can be very confusing. As you know, there are no strict pronunciation rules in the English language, so when you see an unknown English word, you cannot be 100% sure how to pronounce it.

The same English letter, or combination of letters, can be pronounced differently in different words. Moreover, the same English word can be pronounced in different ways by native English speakers from different countries, or even from the same country! That makes the English language hard to learn and understand.

This tool will serve you as an English pronunciation guide and will help you save time. You will no longer need to look up the pronunciation of words in a dictionary.

If you use the phonetic transcription regularly in combination with English audio and video recordings, your pronunciation and listening skills in the English language will improve.

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English pronunciation dictionaries that we recommend

Some of the dictionaries listed below are not really pronunciation dictionaries, but just regular English dictionaries. However we used all of them extensively when we were proofreading our database with pronunciations of English words.

American English

• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition
• Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary

British English

• Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
• Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• Collins English Dictionary

Australian English

• Macquarie Dictionary Eighth Edition

Mobile apps with English dictionaries

Some English dictionaries mentioned above are available as mobile apps.

American English

• Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary
• Learner's Dictionary
• Learner's Dictionary

British English

• English Pronouncing Dictionary
• English Pronouncing Dictionary
• Cambridge English Dictionary for Advanced Learners
• Cambridge English Dictionary for Advanced Learners

Check our English phonetic subtitle converter and obtain something like this:

Greetings from the developer Timur

Find out how to activate your brain and learn faster (4 min.)

Timur Baytukalov. A Complete Guide to Language Learning. Part 1: Learning Pronunciation

Free Webinar "Learning English pronunciation the smart way" (26 min.)

To develop this translator, we used information from different sources mentioned on this page. The phonetic transcription was taken from these sources in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada (Paragraph 29, Fair Dealing for the purpose of education).

Alphabetical list of all words with audio or video recordings

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