howjsay.com
A pronouncing dictionary with Instant Sound

Notes on using this dictionary

1  Enter the word you want and when it appears in pink, mouse over it to hear it spoken as often as you want.  Each word is individually pre-recorded and no form of synthetic speech is used.

2  Both American and British spellings are provided.

3  Pronunciation is in Standard British English, with World English alternatives.  Pronunciations are researched from a variety of dictionaries, online forums and other sources.

4  Howjsay shows the closest cluster of letters that it has to your request - for example "furious" used to return "curious".  Accents are not recognised, nor are distinctions between upper and lower case.

5  The lexical corpus includes all of the General Service List (Bauman and Culligan 1995 version).  This is a collection of 2,284 commonly used English words.  More words and phrases will be added progressively. The main source of new words is you: unsuccessful searches are automatically considered for inclusion.

6  Where alternative pronunciations are given, they are either

•  a widely used World English alternative (Eg "cóntroversy" versus "contróversy").  In these cases the first alternative has the status of being the recommended one, on the basis of its having the widest acceptance and use globally (but in many cases the second alternative will be equally acceptable - choose the one you feel most comfortable with!) or
  
  
•   the weak version of the pronunciation - Eg "some" pronounced
  [s + schwa + m].    In most of these cases a brief context is provided (Eg "some" as in "some bread"; "have" as in "They've gone") or
  
  
•   two different pronunciations corresponding to two different parts of speech (Eg "close", which is entered as "close, verb or close, preposition") or to two different meanings (Eg "bow", which is entered as "bow, as in bow tie, or bow as in ship's bow").
  

[Addendum: Sep 23, 2006: Some familiar American alternatives are also given.  If they are not widely used outside the United States, they are prefixed with the words "Also American :..." (Eg "Also American: [t + schwa + meidou]".]

7  Profane language and erotica are excluded from the dictionary in the interests of child learners.

8  No phonetic transcriptions are provided in this dictionary, for two reasons: firstly, the public seldom uses them and when it does so is often misled by them; secondly, any transcription will always be an inferior imitation of the original sounds.  Transcriptions were necessary in the age of the book, because books cannot speak. [Addendum May 30, 2007: we nevertheless developed our own phonetic alphabet for annotation purposes, designed for speed, conciseness and flexibility using a standard computer keyboard.]

9  This dictionary will be a work in progress for many years to come, so please do not condemn it yet for its limited size.  Judge it rather on the entries to date of high-frequency words such as "do" or "has".  And please feel free to criticise, report errata, and make suggestions.

10  Some people are quite passionate about the pronunciation of, for example, "contróversy".  But it is our task here to record the sounds of current educated English rather than to prescribe them.  The fact is that the American "cóntroversy" now enjoys wide acceptance throughout the English-speaking world (not least perhaps due to the phonologically seditious work of CNN), and so it is our duty, however sombre, or indeed somber, to offer it as an alternative to "contróversy".  It is of such stiff stuff that the upper lip of the British phonetician should be fashioned, giving short shrift to chauvinism.

Tim Bowyer, Amman, Jordan June 2006

Dedication: the genial curiosity of Miss Magali Naime, of Choueifat, Beirut, Lebanon prompted the creation of this website.

Guides to the sound systems of ten languages

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