Template talk:IPAc-en

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Frequently asked questions

The IPA is gibberish and I can't read it. Why doesn't Wikipedia use a normal pronunciation key?

The IPA is the international standard for phonetic transcription, and therefore the Wikipedia standard as well. Many non-American and/or EFL-oriented dictionaries and pedagogical texts have adopted the IPA, and as a result, it is far less confusing for many people around the world than any alternative. It may be confusing in some aspects to some English speakers, but that is precisely because it is conceived with an international point of view. The sound of y in "yes" is spelled /j/ in the IPA, and this was chosen from German and several other languages which spell this sound j.

For English words, Wikipedia does use a "normal" pronunciation key. It is Help:Pronunciation respelling key, and may be used in addition to the IPA, enclosed in the {{respell}} template. See the opening sentences of Beijing, Cochineal, and Lepidoptera for a few examples. But even this is not without problems; for example, cum laude would be respelled kuum-LOW-day, but this could easily be misread as koom-LOH-day. English orthography is simply too inconsistent in regard to its correspondence to pronunciation, and therefore a completely intuitive respelling system is infeasible. This is why our respelling system must be used merely to augment the IPA, not to replace it.

Wikipedia deals with a vast number of topics from foreign languages, and many of these languages contain sounds that do not exist in English. In these cases, a respelling would be entirely inadequate. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation for further discussion.

The IPA should be specific to a particular national standard, and the national pronunciations should be listed separately.

Listing multiple national pronunciations after every Wikipedia entry word quickly becomes unwieldy, and listing only one leads to accusations of bias. Therefore, we use a system that aims at being pan-dialectal. Of course, if a particular dialect or local pronunciation is relevant to the topic, it may be listed in addition to the wider pronunciation, using {{IPA|und|...}} or {{IPA|en|...|generic=yes}}.

The use of /r/ for the rhotic consonant is inaccurate. It should be /ɹ/ instead.

The English rhotic is pronounced in a wide variety of ways in accents of English around the world, and the goal of our diaphonemic system is to cover as many of them as possible. Moreover, where there is no phonological contrast to possibly cause confusion, using a more typographically recognizable letter for a sound represented by another symbol in the narrow IPA is totally within the confines of the IPA's principles (IPA Handbook, pp. 27–28). In fact, /r/ is arguably the more traditional IPA notation; not only is it used by most if not all dictionaries, but also in Le Maître Phonétique, the predecessor to the Journal of the IPA, which was written entirely in phonetic transcription, ⟨r⟩ was the norm for the English rhotic.

automatic generation of respell

It seems like it should be possible to automatically generate respells in this template, which would be a good feature. To borrow sdkb's example from Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Pronunciation/Archive_10#h-Automating_Template:Respell_better-2020-12-08T01:44:00.000Z, the most recent discussion of this I could easily find, (and incorporating Nardog's point about syllabification):

I'd think it'd be a simple enough matter to just have {{IPAc-en|ə|.|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z|respell=yes}} → /ə.ˈkɪl.iːz/ ə-KIL-eez than to have to do {{IPAc-en|ə|.|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z}} {{respell|ə|KIL|eez}} → /ə.ˈkɪl.iːz/ ə-KIL-eez. This would help us avoid repeating ourselves, making it easier if we ever decide to e.g. change our pronunciation key. Would anyone be interested in coding the |respell= parameter?

Dingolover6969 (talk) 04:25, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for reviving this discussion, @Dingolover6969! I still think this would be an excellent feature to develop if anyone has the time and technical knowhow. Sdkb ^talk 04:39, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Minor point: A stress mark implies syllabification (IIUC), so you can simplify .|' to just '

{{IPAc-en|ə|ˈ|k|ɪ|l|.|iː|z|respell=yes}} → /əˈkɪl.iːz/ ə-KIL-eez

— W.andrea (talk) 13:53, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For one thing, it would require checking the output for bad respelled syllables, e.g. in "metonymy"

{{IPAc-en|m|ə|ˈ|t|ɒ|n|.|ɪ|m|.|i|respell=yes}} → /məˈtɒn.ɪm.i/ mə-*TON-im-ee

This example is from Help:Pronunciation respelling key § When to use and when not to: [avoid] when a respelled syllable would be the same as an existing word that is pronounced differently.

— W.andrea (talk) 14:12, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look at the notes on the respelling page. I see some snags in there:

... it is acceptable in some cases to attribute the following consonant to the same syllable as the checked vowel, as in bal-AY, even though in IPA it is customary to attribute it to the following syllable, as in /bæˈleɪ/. However, when the following consonant is a voiceless plosive ...
... use yoo(r), unless it is subject to yod-dropping or yod-coalescence
/s/ may be respelled ss instead of s when otherwise it may be misinterpreted as /z/: "ice" EYESS, "tense" TENSS (compare eyes, tens).

That said, even if what you want isn't possible to do 100% reliably, it should be possible to write a tool that at least gets most of the way there. Maybe it could give its best guess, then flag the edge cases (like the above ones) and ask you what to do with them, like: "Detected an ⟨s⟩. Does this risk being confused with /z/?" If yes, it replaces it with ⟨ss⟩.

— W.andrea (talk) 19:15, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Aid

Is this the right place to ask for help in inserting an IPA pronunciation? I used https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/english-to-ipa-translator/ to create one but am having difficulty in putting it into wiki code. The name I'd like to create is: Teatime, as tee-ah-tim-ee. Halbared (talk) 09:31, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think Help talk:IPA/English would be a better place to ask, though if you're having trouble with this template specifically, then this page is fine. You'll need to explain what the problem is either way. — W.andrea (talk) 13:51, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like you want something like {{IPAc-en|t|i|A:|t|I|m|i}} → /tiɑːtɪmi/, however this is incomplete because it's missing emphasis. Note that I'm using ASCII shorthands for the IPA symbols, which this template converts automatically. For reference, "teatime" is {{IPAc-en|'|t|i:|t|ai|m}} → /ˈtiːtaɪm/ — W.andrea (talk) 14:11, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, that is most helpful.Halbared (talk) 14:59, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation of /e/

Hi, for example for "Gemini" word the pronunciation of Oxford is {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dʒ|e|m|.|ə|.|n|aɪ}} and rendered as /ˈdʒ[invalid input: 'e']m.ə.naɪ/ Which has bug for the voice /e/. Please inspect. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 05:57, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Use /ɛ/: {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dʒ|ɛ|m|.|ə|.|n|aɪ}} → /ˈdʒɛm.ə.naɪ/. See Help:IPA/English#cite_note-20 for why we use /ɛ/ rather than /e/. Nardog (talk) 06:08, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, is there a way to programmatically correct the template to accept /e/ as input and then show /ɛ/ as output? Because using /e/ is the tradition of Oxford dictionary, see here. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 06:16, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As the link I provided explains, the problem with that idea is that /e/ is also used for what we transcribe with /eɪ/ so the template can't know whether the user intended to mean /ɛ/ or /eɪ/. Nardog (talk) 06:17, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(FWIW, the link you gave is Cambridge, not Oxford, and Oxford now uses /ɛ/, except in works aimed at non-native speakers such as the Advanced Learner's Dictionary.) Nardog (talk) 06:21, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I got the reason. But the thrown exception text is "[invalid input: 'e']" which is very ambiguous. I propose to correct the thrown exception text to:

ambiguous input: use /ɛ/ or /eɪ/ instead of /e/

This way, the thrown exception text would be more useful to users. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 06:27, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For future reference:

/ɛ/ is transcribed with ⟨e⟩ in many dictionaries. However, /eɪ/ is also sometimes transcribed with ⟨e⟩, especially in North American literature, so ⟨ɛ⟩ is chosen here.

— W.andrea (talk) 12:00, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, you can use the alias E for /ɛ/, which is from X-SAMPA.

In fact, you can write the whole thing in ASCII: {{IPAc-en|ˈ|dZ|E|m|.|@|.|n|aI}} → /ˈdʒɛm.ə.naɪ/

— W.andrea (talk) 12:06, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some tooltips could be improved

Some thoughts I had:

/ɡ/: 'g' in 'guy' -> 'g' in 'guy'

It's unnecessary and inconsistent to show both the IPA and the letter when these are identical (the current pattern is <'b' in 'buy'> but </j/: 'y' in 'yes'>).

'spheroidal' -> 'hero', 'coir' -> 'employer'

'spheroidal' and 'coir' are quite rare words. I'd suggest replacing them with more common ones like 'hero' (or 'zero', 'period', 'cereal', 'material' etc.) and 'employer' (or 'destroyer', 'voyeur' etc.)

/ʔ/: the catch in 'uh-oh' -> /ʔ/: '-' in 'uh-oh'

"catch" might not be familiar in this sense to those learning English, and "-" is more consistent with the rest of the tooltip system.

/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in 'nurse' -> [removed]

/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in 'nurse' really shouldn't exist because the diaphoneme system works on the principle that rhoticity is defined, but can be ignored. 'fur' already does the job so there's no need for an "r-less 'ur'". There are no vowels in the NURSE lexical set that don't have <r> in (at least, to my knowledge).

/ʊər/: 'our' in 'tour' -> /ʊər/: 'our' in 'cure'

'tour' isn't the best choice for /ʊər/, because 'tour' is normally one of the words which is changed in accents which only partially have the pour-poor merger. 'cure' is a better choice because it tends to be conserved where CURE is a present but declining set.[1]

For some reason /juː/ and /jʊər/ are buried at the bottom of the table in the doc. They should probably be moved up (at least above the punctuation, but I'd suggest near "goose" and "tour [sic]" ). ^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 15:14, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect /ɡ/ was left in because it's written with a different character (U+0261) than 'g' (U+0067) and may display differently depending on your fonts. Though, it's questionable if there's any value in using U+0261 instead of U+0067 in the first place. 'Spheroidal' is used for the input codes where the /r/ begins a stressed syllable, which wouldn't be used in transcription of 'hero' or any other words you suggested. No idea if there's any allophonic variation worth preserving, but that's why it is that. The /ɜː/ is a marginal phoneme that, just like /ʔ/ or /x/, doesn't exist in normal words. Sometimes given a separate symbol /œ/, sometimes pronounced with an intrusive /r/. Consider the proper name /ˈɡɜːtə/ 'Goethe'. See also the previous discussions of ɔɪər and ɜː. The codes juː and jʊər are at the bottom because they exist for compatibility only and you shouldn't use them. (Yes, I agree, it could be more explicit than that.) – MwGamera (talk) 01:35, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What MwGamera said, except Goethe should be transcribed with /ɜːr/ since it is pronounced with the NURSE vowel in rhotic accents too (hence Möbius in the key).

/ɔɪər/ represents the rare situation in which a word has /ɔɪə/ in RP and /ɔɪr/ in GA, so employer wouldn't do (and voyeur is /vwɑːˈjɜːr, vɔɪˈɜːr/).

cure is a terrible example because lots of people will interpret it as /jʊər/ rather than /ʊər/. Tour being "one of the words which is changed in accents which only partially have the pour-poor merger" is a good thing because that's what the diaphoneme /ʊər/ represents ("/ʊər/ or /ɔːr/"). And /ʊər/ being more likely to be unmerged after /Cj/ than elsewhere isn't even true globally; in Singapore it's the opposite. Nardog (talk) 03:14, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In my defense, dictionaries say Goethe can also be pronounced with a non-rhotic vowel even by rhotic speakers. CEPD17 says exactly what I wrote (except that I skipped the syllable division) and implies the American pronunciation is the same by not respelling it with /ɝ:/ like it does for Goering. After reviewing H:IPA/EN, I'm not sure anymore how to interpret M-W and AHD's \œ\. It might not be a single phoneme, but I'd expect this to mean something else than the actual NURSE, esp. when M-W lists the pronunciation with \ər\ separately here. – MwGamera (talk) 06:10, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As explained in the note, /ɜː/ can only be used for non-rhotic accents (so of course American dictionaries' ⟨œ⟩ doesn't mean NURSE), and we have no way of converting a transcription with ⟨œ⟩ in those dictionaries to our diaphonemic system. Some dictionaries include non-English pronunciations using their symbols for English supplemented with ⟨œ⟩ etc. (without distinguishing them from pronunciations English speakers actually use). Editors have found it best not to include those, to err on the descriptive side and since we have keys for other languages. Nardog (talk) 08:18, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your comments! I have amended my proposals accordingly:

/ʔ/: the catch in 'uh-oh' -> /ʔ/: '-' in 'uh-oh'

"catch" might not be familiar in this sense to those learning English, and "-" is more consistent with the rest of the tooltip system.

/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in 'nurse' -> /ɜː/: ~~r-less 'ur'~~ 'oe' in 'Goethe'

"nurse" clearly isn't an example of the marginal phoneme we're talking about.
If we say that this is a marginal phoneme then it must necessarily be found in some rhotic accents, otherwise it would simply be part of NURSE.

^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 18:12, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

/ɜː/ doesn't have a single counterpart in rhotic accents. In möbius it's /ɛ/ or /oʊ/, in föhn it's /eɪ/, in pho it's /ʌ/, and so on. So it cannot be illustrated with a word that actually would be transcribed with /ɜː/. Nardog (talk) 13:20, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If I've understood correctly, there does exist an extra phoneme in some rhotic accents (1 2), but it also has lots of other inconsistent pronunciations. We want to indicate this phoneme, so we use the analogy of 'nurse' without the 'r'.

With that said, I still think that the current wording is needlessly confusing because it can easily be read (and I did) as 'the 'ur' in nurse that we all know has no r in'.

/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in 'nurse' -> /ɜː/: like 'ur' in 'nurse' without the 'r' sound

It doesn't seem like anyone has any problems with the "catch" proposal, but I would of course welcome thoughts there too if anyone has any.

I'm grateful for you for explaining why most of my original proposals would not have improved the article, but hopefully we can get some value out of this discussion nevertheless. ^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 15:12, 4 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

/ɜː/ is not "'ur' without the 'r'". That would be /ʌ/.

/ʔ/ is vanishingly rare, so it's kind of neither here nor there, but the glottal stop is often considered obligatory at the beginning of "uh-oh", not just before "oh", so I find the current wording better. Nardog (talk) 02:34, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in 'nurse' -> /ɜː/: like /ɜːr/ 'ur' in 'nurse' without the 'r' sound

I meant specifically the /ɜːr/ 'ur' in 'nurse'. A description of removing the 'r' from that 'ur' indicates /ɜː/ for nearly all speakers (rhotic or not, as non-rhotic speakers don't have an 'r' to remove), which is what we want. You're right to suggest that spelling alone is a bad indicator, so let's also include the 'nurse' IPA so there's no ambiguity (on top of the fact that we're not using language that suggests the 'ur' in 'nurse' is 'r-less', as currently).
Scottish English speakers who have /ʌr/ for FUR will interpret both of these descriptions as /ʌ/ so don't factor into this discussion, but at least by detailing the IPA carefully we give them more of a hint that the sound described has the quality of merged NURSE, rather than their unmerged FUR. If we want a truly universal description, then maybe something like "like /əː/, a longer version of the 'a' in 'about'" is preferable.

/ʔ/: the catch in 'uh-oh' -> /ʔ/: '-' in 'uh-oh'

I'd say the fact that 'uh-oh' uses two glottal stops is slightly irrelevant because we only need one for people unfamiliar with IPA to make the connection. If we used the word 'considerable' to indicate schwa, we could detail both 'o' and 'e', but only indicating one is necessary. In the same way, we only need to indicate one of the glottal stops, and since only one is actually indicated in spelling ('-', the other being unwritten) it makes sense to use that one alone, rather than introduce language that the reader may not be familiar with. This template is ultimately meant to provide a quick aide to parsing IPA for those who can't read it, so we should tend towards practicality rather than linguistic satisfaction. Indicating both glottal stops is unnecessary and more confusing that it needs to be. Using a section of the spelling provided ('-') is simpler and better.

^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 14:39, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You've persuaded me about the glottal stop. But it doesn't strike me as worthwhile to try to evoke /ɜː/ for rhotic speakers. For them, /ɜː/ doesn't exist without /r/. So it makes little sense to say /ɜː/ without the /r/, especially for those whose NURSE is [ɚ], like most North Americans, for whom clipped NURSE is still [ɚ]. They're also likely to have some familiarity with what NURSE sounds like in RP-like accents, and "r-less" (which predates "non-rhotic") serves as a tidy, less technical shorthand for it. Nardog (talk) 11:26, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You make a good point, but I still think that "r-less" is potentially confusing because it doesn't actually imply that an RP-like accent is being indicated ("[ɚ] without the 'r'" is still the natural reading for most North American speakers). I think that the best solution would be to somehow specify the accent that's being evoked by writing something like "/ɜː/: r-less 'ur' in RP 'nurse'". This is of course not perfect as RP itself may not be a comprehensible term, but it will still give an indication even for those who don't understand it that it refers to some specific accent. If we're willing to be slightly vague with the description, I think that something like "prestige England English" would refer to RP for most lay-people without requiring them to look up any new terminology, and thereby unambiguously indicate the 'right' pronunciation (though it is a bit clunky). I'm undecided on this really, but surely giving an indication of the accent is better than not at all? Even writing "r-less 'ur' in non-rhotic 'nurse'" would be an improvement. ^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 13:42, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would wager that "r-less" is a more recognizable term than "non-rhotic" or "RP", especially for rhotic speakers. "Rhotic" is a recent coinage arising from the fact "r-ful" sounds like awful in non-rhotic accents, which means it didn't need replacing for rhotic speakers. Nardog (talk) 05:21, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Completely agree: let's keep /ɜː/ as is. Thanks for entertaining my suggestions anyhow.

Do you think you'd be able to make the edit to /ʔ/ in the source and the doc (I'm not a template editor)? Thanks again! ^{[citation unneeded]} (talk) 13:13, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]