/ˈevri saʊnd hæz ə ˈsɪmbəl/
The International Phonetic Alphabet gives every human speech sound its own unique, unambiguous symbol — so you always know exactly how a word is pronounced.
Explore the sounds →English spelling is notoriously treacherous. The letters ough are pronounced differently in though, through, tough, cough, thought, and bough. Six spellings. Six different sounds. And that's before you get to colonel or worcestershire.
The International Phonetic Alphabet sidesteps the chaos entirely — one symbol, one sound, always. It was created in 1888 by a group of language teachers who were frankly tired of this nonsense, and it now covers every sound in every human language.
/flæʃ/ beside flash, each symbol stands for exactly one sound: /f/ as in fan, /l/ as in let, /æ/ as in bat, /ʃ/ as in ship.
To read English fluently in IPA you only need about 44 symbols — far fewer than the 26 letters that are doing their very best and failing half the time.
Click any symbol to hear an example word and learn how to make the sound. Your browser will speak it aloud.
Beyond the individual symbols, IPA uses a handful of conventions you'll encounter in any dictionary entry.
Five words written in IPA. Work out which English word each one represents.
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