How to Pronounce: Hear Words, Syllables and IPA

Hear how to pronounce any word, in different accents

Type a word and press Say it. The page shows the word split into syllables, with the stressed syllable drawn bigger, a plain-English respelling (like pruh-nuhn-see-AY-shuhn) and the IPA transcription that dictionaries use. Where a word has more than one accepted pronunciation (either, data, route) or a different one in British English (tomato, schedule, privacy), each one has its own tab.

Accents and voices

The voices are the ones built into your device and browser, so the list is different on a phone, a Mac or Windows. The accent buttons (US, UK, Australia, India, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, Scotland and more) only show the accents your device actually has. Choose a voice from the list (you can search it and press ▶ to hear a sample), and change the speed, pitch and volume. Slowly plays at about half speed, Syllable by syllable says each syllable on its own with that syllable lit up, then the whole word, and Loop keeps repeating until you press Stop. If a voice does not make a sound (some phones list voices whose data is not installed), the page notices, says so and switches to another voice.

Real recordings

For many English words there are also recordings of real people from Wikimedia Commons, usually US and UK and sometimes Australian or Canadian, found through the free dictionaryapi.dev. Each one shows its licence and a link to its source.

Where the syllables and IPA come from

American pronunciations come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (about 126,000 words and names, free under a BSD licence). The page splits each pronunciation into syllables by sound, giving consonants to the next syllable where English allows it, and turns the dictionary's sounds into IPA and a respelling. British forms of words that differ are written in by hand. The Written line splits the spelling into syllables too; that one is an estimate from spelling rules, so it can differ from a printed dictionary's hyphenation. Words that are not in the dictionary get a syllable count estimated from the spelling, and the page says so.

Practice

In Chrome, Edge and Safari you can press the microphone and say the word. The browser's own speech recognition writes down what it heard, and the page tells you whether it matches. In Chrome your voice is sent to the browser maker's speech service to do this; nothing is sent to mes.fm.

Questions

What is the stressed syllable?

The one said a little louder, longer and higher than the others. In baNAna it is the second. Getting the stress right matters more than any single sound: REcord is a noun and reCORD is a verb.

What is IPA?

The International Phonetic Alphabet: one symbol for each sound, the same in every language. Dictionaries put it between slashes, like /təˈmeɪtoʊ/. The mark ˈ comes before the stressed syllable and ˌ before a syllable with lighter stress. Open the IPA and respelling key above for every symbol with an example.

Can it say words in other languages?

Yes: choose the language under Accent and voice. Your device's voices for that language read the text. Syllables, IPA and the respelling are only shown for English.

Is anything saved?

Your last words and voice settings stay in this browser only. Single English words are looked up on dictionaryapi.dev to find recordings.