English pronunciation checker

Pronunciation is pronounced pruh-nun-see-AY-shun, /prəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/. It has five syllables with the main stress on AY. The second syllable is nun, not noun, even though the verb pronounce has noun in it.

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It tells you whether the word was understood, not how native you sound. Speech recognition guesses whole words and often fills in a small slip, so a word can pass with a vowel that is a little off. When it writes a different word, the comparison is exact: it compares the dictionary sounds of the two words. Listen to your own recording to catch the rest.

Look at three things: the stress (which syllable is loudest), the vowel sounds in the IPA, and any silent letters. Type the word above to see all three and hear it. The checker knows about 118,000 words.

The International Phonetic Alphabet, sometimes called the international pronunciation alphabet, gives one symbol to each sound. English spelling does not: ough sounds different in though, through and tough. Dictionaries use IPA so you can see exactly how a word sounds. The mark ˈ comes before the stressed syllable.

The biggest one is R. Americans say the R in car and water, most British speakers do not. Americans often turn a T between vowels into a quick D, so water sounds like WAH-der. Some vowels differ too, as in vitamin and tomato, and a few words change completely, like schedule (SKEJ-ool in the US, often SHEJ-ool in the UK).

Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the accent long treated as the standard for British English, linked to the south of England and to the BBC of the past. Only a small share of British people speak it, but most dictionaries base their UK pronunciations on a modern form of it, and so do the UK transcriptions here.

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Our recordings use one American voice, the tutor voice of the Slova app, for the 170 difficult words. For British English the card gives the UK IPA and respelling, and the UK button reads the word with your device’s own British voice when it has one. Device voices differ from phone to phone, so trust the IPA when they disagree.

The 170 difficult words were each checked against the Cambridge Dictionary and the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries by a person. The other words come from two open pronunciation dictionaries, CMUdict for American English (about 118,000 words) and Britfone for British English (about 15,000 common words), converted to the same notation. Those are not checked by hand.