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Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same).
If the pronunciation in a specific accent is desired, square brackets may be used, perhaps with a link to IPA chart for English dialects, which describes several national standards, or with a comment that the pronunciation is General American, Received Pronunciation, Australian English, etc. Local pronunciations are of particular interest in ...
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. [4]
For example, you may pronounce cot and caught the same, do and dew, or marry and merry. This often happens because of dialect variation (see our articles English phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects). If this is the case, you will pronounce those symbols the same for other words as well. [1]
The dictionary content is licensed from Oxford University Press's Oxford Languages. [3] It is available in different languages, such as English, Spanish and French. The service also contains pronunciation audio, Google Translate, a word origin chart, Ngram Viewer, and word games, among other features for the English-language version.
The Natural Language Toolkit contains an interface to the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The Carnegie Mellon Logios [5] tool incorporates the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. PronunDict, a pronunciation dictionary of American English, uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary as its data source. Pronunciation is transcribed in IPA symbols.
A word like immediately, for example, is variously pronounced by Americans as: ihMEEdeeuhtlee; uhMEEdeeuhtlee; eeMEEdeeuhtlee; The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary suggests the first pronunciation. Similarly, this pronunciation markup guide will choose the most widely used form. NOTE: This guide is designed to be simple and easy to use.
Omitting or adding such detail does not make a difference to the identity of the word, but helps to give a more precise pronunciation. ⫽Double slashes⫽ indicate diaphonemes . For example, some speakers pronounce dune as /djuːn/ with a distinct /j/ , others /duːn/ as if spelled doon , and even others /dʒuːn/ like June .