IPA Pronunciation Guide

Why one alphabet can spell every sound

English spelling is famously unreliable: the letters ough are pronounced five different ways in through, though, tough, cough, and bough. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) solves this by giving every distinct speech sound — every phoneme — exactly one symbol, no matter how it happens to be written. When a dictionary prints /θruː/ next to through, it is telling you the precise sounds to make, independent of the chaotic spelling. This reference lays out the symbols this tool covers: the vowel chart, the consonant chart organised by how and where each sound is made, and a table of more than 200 common English words with their transcriptions.

Reading the vowel chart

Vowels are organised on two axes that describe what your tongue is doing. Height runs from close (tongue high, mouth nearly shut) to open (tongue low, mouth wide); backness runs from front (tongue near the teeth) to back (tongue near the throat). Take three words from the word list: see is /siː/ with the close front vowel i, cat is /kæt/ with the near-open front vowel æ, and moon is /muːn/ with the close back rounded vowel u. Say all three slowly and you can feel your tongue drop and slide backward. The ː mark after a vowel means it is held longer — that length is exactly what separates see /siː/ from sit /sɪt/.

One symbol does more work than any other: the schwa, ə. It is the relaxed "uh" of unstressed syllables — the first sound of about /əˈbaʊt/ and the last of mother /ˈmʌðər/. English crams an enormous share of its syllables into the schwa, which is why it appears constantly in the word table.

Reading the consonant chart

Consonants are grouped by manner (how the airflow is shaped) and place (where in the mouth). The chart here separates plosives, fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants, and affricates. Many come in voiced/voiceless pairs made at the same place: put a finger on your throat and say s then z — the position is identical, but z buzzes because the vocal folds vibrate. The same pairing holds for p/b, t/d, f/v, and θ/ð (the two th sounds in thin versus this).

A worked example: transcribing "judge"

Search the consonant chart for the affricate dʒ — a d and a ʒ fused into one sound, the example word being judge. The full transcription is /dʒʌdʒ/: the same affricate opens and closes the word, with the open-mid back vowel ʌ (as in cup) between them. Notice that the written letters d-g-e and j both map to the single sound dʒ. That one-symbol-per-sound discipline is the whole point of the IPA.

How the audio works

Click the play button on any symbol card or word row and the tool speaks the example word aloud using your browser's built-in Web Speech API (specifically SpeechSynthesisUtterance set to en-US). Two things follow from that. First, the voice is whatever speech engine your operating system provides, so the same word may sound slightly different on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Second, the tool synthesises the whole written word — it does not pronounce a bare symbol in isolation, because a lone consonant like p has no natural sound without a vowel beside it. Clicking a symbol instead copies that Unicode character to your clipboard so you can paste it into a document or transcription.

Practical tips

• Use the search box to find by description, not just symbol. Typing nasal filters to m, n, ŋ and the rest; typing fricative surfaces every hissing sound at once. This is faster than hunting through the grid when you only half-remember a symbol.
• Watch for length and stress marks. The ː means a long vowel and the raised tick ˈ before a syllable marks primary stress. They change meaning: desert the noun and desert the verb differ only in which syllable carries the ˈ.
• Copy real IPA characters, not look-alikes. The symbols here are the genuine Unicode code points. Typing a plain Latin g where you need ɡ (the single-storey IPA g) can break a linguistics document, so copy from the cards rather than retyping.

Common mistakes

• Confusing the symbol with the spelling. The IPA j is the y sound in yes /jes/, not the j of jam. The IPA c is a palatal plosive, not the k or s of English c. Read symbols by their chart description, never by how the letter looks in English.
• Expecting one universal "correct" pronunciation. The transcriptions here lean toward General American, but English has many accents. A British speaker says bath with ɑː where an American uses æ; neither is wrong. Treat a transcription as one valid model, not the only one.
• Ignoring affricates and diphthongs as single units. Sounds like tʃ (in chin) and vowel glides like aɪ (in eye) are one phoneme each, not two letters stuck together — that is why they get their own cards.