Pronunciation respelling for English

A 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.
There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling:

"Phonemic" systems, as commonly found in American dictionaries, consistently use one symbol per English phoneme. These systems are conceptually equivalent to the International Phonetic Alphabet commonly used in bilingual dictionaries and scholarly writings but tend to use symbols based on English rather than Romance-language spelling conventions and avoid non-alphabetic symbols.
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.

As an example, one pronunciation of Arkansas, transcribed in the IPA, could be respelled är′kən-sô′ or in a phonemic system, and arken-saw in a non-phonemic system.

Development and use

Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. 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. 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. 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.
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. English dictionaries have used various such respelling systems to convey phonemic representations of the spoken word since Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, the earliest being devised by James Buchanan was featured in his 1757 dictionary Linguæ Britannicæ Vera Pronunciatio, although most words therein were not respelled but given diacritics; since the language described by Buchanan was that of Scotland, William Kenrick responded in 1773 with A New Dictionary of the English Language, wherein the pronunciation of Southern England was covered and numbers rather than diacritics used to represent vowel sounds; Thomas Sheridan devised a simpler scheme, which he employed in his successful 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language, a much larger work consisting of two volumes; in 1791 John Walker produced A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, which achieved a great reputation and ran into some forty editions. Today, such systems remain in use in American dictionaries for native English speakers, but they have been replaced by the International Phonetic Alphabet in linguistics references and many bilingual dictionaries published outside the United States.
The pronunciation which dictionaries refer to is some chosen "normal" one, thereby excluding other regional accents or dialect pronunciation. In England this standard is normally the Received Pronunciation, based upon the educated speech of southern England. The standard for American English is known as General American.
Sophisticated phonetic systems have been developed, such as James Murray's scheme for the original Oxford English Dictionary, and the IPA, which replaced it in later editions and has been adopted by many British and international dictionaries. The IPA system is not a respelling system, because it uses symbols not in the English alphabet, such as ð and θ. Most current British dictionaries use IPA for this purpose.

Traditional respelling systems

The following chart matches the IPA symbols used to represent the sounds of the English language with the phonetic symbols used in several dictionaries, a majority of which transcribe American English.
These works adhere to the one-symbol-per-sound principle. Other works not included here, such as Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, do not adhere and thus have several different symbols for the same sound.

Title abbreviations

IPA – Compromise dialect-neutral English pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet, as used in Wikipedia.
K&K – General American pronunciation using symbols largely corresponding to those of the IPA in A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English , John S. Kenyon, Thomas A. Knott. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster.
APA – Americanist phonetic notation, used primarily in linguistics literature in the U.S.
NOAD – New Oxford American Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press..
AHD – American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Also used by the Columbia Encyclopedia.
RHD – Random House Dictionary of the English Language.
WBO – World Book Online.
MECD – Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary.
DPL – Dictionary of Pronunciation, Abraham Lass and Betty Lass.
DPN – Dictionary of Pronunciation, Samuel Noory.
TBD – Thorndike Barnhart Dictionary.
NBC – NBC Handbook of Pronunciation.
MWCD – Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
OED – Oxford English Dictionary.
COD – The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 5th edition, E. McIntosh, ed. Oxford: OUP.
POD – The Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, E. Jewell, Oxford: OUP.
Cham – The Chambers Dictionary.
CPD – The Chambers Paperback Dictionary.
SD – Scholastic Dictionary.
BLD – Black's Law Dictionary.
AB – ARPABET, a commonly used computerized encoding of English pronunciation. It is used by the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.
Dictcom – Dictionary.com uses a custom phonetic alphabet.
BBC – BBC Phonetic Respelling.
Google – Google's pronunciation dictionary.
Mac - Macquarie Dictionary's "say" respelling system.
Wikipedia – Wikipedia Pronunciation Respelling Key, used in some Wikipedia articles to spell out the pronunciations of English words.
Pronunciation without respelling

Some dictionaries indicate hyphenation and syllabic stress in the headword. A few have even used diacritics to show pronunciation "without respelling" in the headwords.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1st through 4th edition, used a mix of two systems. Some editions of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary have offered a method for teachers to indicate pronunciation without respelling as a supplement to the respelling scheme used in the dictionary. Pronunciation without respelling is also sometimes used in texts with many unusual words, such as Bibles, when it is desirable to show the received pronunciation. These will often be more exhaustive than dictionary respelling keys because all possible digraphs or readings need to have a unique spelling.

COD variant	IPA
ph
kn
wr
g, dg	otherwise
c	otherwise
ai, ay
air
ae, ea, ee, ie
ė, ie, ey
ear, eer, ier
aw
oy
ou
i͡r, u͡r
eu, ew

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a standardized method of phonetic transcription developed by a group of English and French language teachers in 1888. In the beginning, only specialized pronunciation dictionaries for linguists used it, for example, the English Pronouncing Dictionary edited by Daniel Jones. The IPA, used by English teachers as well, started to appear in popular dictionaries for learners of English as a foreign language such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
IPA is very flexible and allows for a wide variety of transcriptions between broad phonemic transcriptions which describe the significant units of meaning in language and phonetic transcriptions which may indicate every nuance of sound in detail.
The IPA transcription conventions used in the first twelve editions of the was relatively simple, using a quantitative system indicating vowel length using a triangular colon, and requiring the reader to infer other vowel qualities. Many phoneticians preferred a qualitative system, which used different symbols to indicate vowel timbre and colour. A. C. Gimson introduced a quantitative-qualitative IPA notation system when he took over editorship of the EPD ; and by the 1990s, the Gimson system had become the de facto standard for phonetic notation of British Received Pronunciation.

word			Gimson
rid
reed
cod
cord

The first native English dictionary using IPA may have been the Collins English Dictionary, and others followed suit. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition used IPA, transcribed letter-for-letter from entries in the first edition, which had been noted in a scheme by the original editor, James Murray.
While IPA has not been adopted by popular dictionaries in the United States, there is a demand for learner's dictionaries which provide both British and American English pronunciation. Some dictionaries, such as the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English provide a separate transcription for each.
British and American English dialects have a similar set of phonemes, but some are pronounced differently; in technical parlance, they consist of different phones. Although developed for RP, the Gimson system being phonemic, it is not far from much of General American pronunciation as well. A number of recent dictionaries, such as the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, add a few non-phonemic symbols to represent both RP and General American pronunciation in a single IPA transcription.

	Pronounced in General American.
	In American English falls between and
	This traditional transcription is probably more accurately replaced by in American English.
	Regular r is always pronounced
	Superscript r is only pronounced in rhotic dialects, such as General American, or when followed by a vowel
	Medium i can be pronounced or, depending on the dialect
	Many Americans pronounce the same as
	Syllabic l, sometimes transcribed or
	Syllabic n, sometimes transcribed or

Clive Upton updated the Gimson scheme, changing the symbols used for five vowels. He served as pronunciation consultant for the influential Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which adopted this scheme in its ninth edition. Upton's reform is controversial: it reflects changing pronunciation, but critics say it represents a narrower regional accent, and abandons parallelism with American and Australian English. In addition, the phonetician John C. Wells said that he could not understand why Upton had altered the presentation of price to.
Upton outlined his reasons for the transcription in a chapter of A Handbook of Varieties of English. He said that the -vowel represented how the starting point could be anything from centralised front to centralised back. The change in the NURSE vowel was intended as a simplification as well as a reflection that was not the only possible realisation in RP. The other alterations were intended to reflect changes that have occurred over time.

word	Gimson	Upton
bet
bat
nurse
square
price

The in-progress 3rd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary uses Upton's scheme for representing British pronunciations. For American pronunciations it uses an IPA-based scheme devised by William Kretzschmar of the University of Georgia.