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. 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. 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. 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. Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. On the other hand, 'non-phonemic' or 'newspaper' systems, commonly used in newspapers and other non-technical writings, avoid diacritics and literally 'respell' words making use of well-known English words and spelling conventions, even though the resulting system may not have a one-to-one mapping between symbols and sounds.Īs an example, one pronunciation of Arkansas, transcribed / ˈ ɑːr k ən s ɔː/ in the IPA, could be respelled är ′kən-sô′ or AR-kən-saw in a phonemic system and ar-kuhn-saw in a non-phonemic system.ē for IPA /i/) and avoid non-alphabetic symbols (e.g.

These systems are conceptually equivalent to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) commonly used in bilingual dictionaries and scholarly writings but tend to use symbols based on English rather than Romance-language spelling conventions (e.g. ' Phonemic' systems, as commonly found in American dictionaries, consistently use one symbol per English phoneme.There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling: the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.Ī 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.

For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Chambers dictionary 2003