HowPronounceIt
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About HowPronounceIt

HowPronounceIt exists to answer one small but constant question: how do you actually say this word? Readers meet new words in books, at work and online long before they hear them spoken, and English spelling is a poor guide to sound.

What you get

  • Audio for every word in American and British English, with a female and a male voice.
  • A plain respelling such as tuh-MAY-toh, so you can say the word without learning symbols first.
  • IPA for both accents, for anyone who wants the exact sounds.
  • The word split into syllables with the main stress highlighted.
  • Meanings, examples, similar words and rhymes, so the sound sticks to the sense.

How the pronunciations are made

American pronunciations come from the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict), with Wiktionary filling in words CMUdict lacks. British pronunciations come from the Britfone dictionary and Wiktionary; where a word is missing there, we derive the British form from the American one using standard sound rules, and only when the result is unambiguous. Tricky words are checked and annotated by hand. The respellings and syllable breaks are generated from these transcriptions.

Audio is produced with neural text-to-speech voices. Where it cannot load, your browser's own voice reads the word.

Data sources and credits

  • CMUdict, Carnegie Mellon University, used under its BSD-style license.
  • Britfone by Jose Llarena, used under the MIT license.
  • Wiktionary (via the kaikki.org / wiktextract extraction): definitions, examples, word origins and many pronunciations, used under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Definitions we adapted from Wiktionary are shared under the same license.
  • WordNet® 3.1, Princeton University. WordNet 3.1 Copyright 2011 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. THIS SOFTWARE AND DATABASE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND PRINCETON UNIVERSITY MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.
  • Word frequency rankings from the wordfreq project by Robyn Speer, used to decide which words get full guides.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake or want a word added? Contact us. Corrections make the site better for everyone.