Phonetic Spelling Generator

Each word is looked up in a pronunciation dictionary of about 120,000 English words and replaced with its respelling, keeping your capitals and punctuation. "Hello, how are you today?" becomes "Hulow, haw ar yu tudey?". A word that is not in the dictionary, such as a rare name or a made-up word, is left as you typed it.

Phonetic spelling represents words exactly as they sound when spoken. Rather than following traditional spelling rules, it breaks down words into their component sounds. For instance, this tool writes "enough" as "inuf" and "thought" as "thot".

This approach helps anyone struggling with pronunciation - whether you're learning English, preparing for a presentation, or teaching someone how to say your name correctly.

Regular spelling follows established rules and conventions (often with many exceptions in English). Phonetic spelling shows exactly how words sound when spoken. "Knight" in regular spelling becomes "nayt" phonetically.

By default it uses a simple respelling in ordinary letters, so it can be read without learning any special symbols. Turn on Mark syllables and stress to split words with hyphens and put the stressed syllable in capitals, as dictionaries do in plain respelling: "bu-NAN-u" (banana), "kum-PYU-ter" (computer). Set Show to IPA for the International Phonetic Alphabet, with ˈ before the stressed syllable: "ˈneɪtʃɚ" (nature).

The pronunciations are American English, from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. There is no British setting, because the dictionary records only American pronunciations. Where a word has more than one pronunciation, the first is used, so "read" always comes out as "red".

Each letter or letter pair below stands for the sound shown. With Mark syllables and stress on, hyphens separate syllables and capitals mark the stressed one; words of one syllable stay in lowercase.

The respelling uses one spelling for some sounds that IPA keeps apart, such as the vowels of "cup" and "food". Show IPA alongside it where the difference matters.

Split the name into syllables, write each one with letters that have only one likely reading in English, and put the stressed syllable in capitals: Siobhan is "shi-VON", Niamh is "NEEV" and Joaquin is "wa-KEEN". Hyphens and capitals are the convention most people recognize, so the result works in an email signature, a profile or a name badge, often in brackets after the name.

Type your name above with Mark syllables and stress turned on for a starting point, then check it against how you say it. Names are where the dictionary is weakest: many are missing, and some entries are wrong, such as "SHAW-ban" for Siobhan. The play button reads what you typed in your browser's voice, which is a guess too, so it can help you hear a problem but cannot confirm a name.

This particular tool focuses on English pronunciation. Different languages have different sound systems, so you'd need language-specific tools for accurate phonetic spelling in other languages.

English has many regional variations. The tool typically uses standard pronunciations, but your local accent might differ. "Bath" sounds different in London versus New York, for instance.

No, that's different. The NATO phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie) clarifies letter spelling over radio. Phonetic spelling shows how to pronounce entire words.

It's generally good for common words but can struggle with:

• Proper names from various origins
• Technical or scientific terms
• Words with multiple valid pronunciations
• Regional variations and accents

Writing down sounds has been humanity's obsession for millennia. The ancient Egyptians started it - their hieroglyphs weren't just pretty pictures. They mixed symbols for ideas with symbols for sounds, creating one of the first hybrid writing systems around 3200 BCE. But the real game-changer? The Phoenicians. Around 1050 BCE, these merchant traders got fed up with complex writing and created an alphabet based purely on sounds. Just 22 letters. Simple. Effective. It spread like wildfire across the Mediterranean.

Here's where English gets interesting. When Latin-trained monks started writing down Old English in the 7th century, they hit a wall. Latin had no letters for sounds like the "th" in "think" or the guttural sound in "loch". So they got creative - borrowed some old runes (þ and ð for "th"), invented letter combos, and made do. Then came the Great Vowel Shift. Between 1400 and 1700, English pronunciation went completely mad. "House" used to sound like "hoos". "Name" rhymed with "mama". But nobody updated the spelling. That's why "knight" still has all those silent letters - in Chaucer's time, you pronounced every single one.