Where do the transcriptions come from?

They come from a subset of the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, converted to IPA symbols. The dictionary covers the most common English words used in everyday writing.

What happens to words not in the dictionary?

Words that are not found are shown unchanged inside square brackets, for example [photosynthesis]. This makes it clear which words were transcribed and which were left alone.

Which accent does it use?

The transcriptions follow General American pronunciation, which is what the CMU dictionary is based on. British (RP) speakers will notice differences such as rhotic r sounds.

Is the transcription narrow or broad?

It is broad, also called phonemic, transcription. It captures the distinctive sounds of each word without marking fine phonetic detail like aspiration or vowel length.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The lookup runs entirely in your browser against a built-in dictionary, so nothing is sent to a server.

English to IPA Transcriber

This tool converts common English words into International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation, the standard system linguists use to write down exactly how words sound. It is useful for language learners, singers, voice actors, and anyone curious about English pronunciation.

How it works

English spelling is famously irregular, so there is no reliable letter-by-letter rule for pronunciation. Instead this tool uses a lookup approach: it splits your text into words, normalises each one to lower case, and searches a built-in dictionary derived from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. When a word is found, it is replaced with its broad IPA transcription in General American.

The transcription is phonemic (broad), meaning it records the meaningful sound contrasts of a word without fine surface detail. Stress marks are included for some multi-syllable words using the IPA primary-stress symbol.

Notes and example

The phrase Hello world transcribes to həˈloʊ wɝld. The ˈ symbol marks the stressed syllable, and ɝ is the r-coloured vowel typical of American English.

Because the dictionary is a curated subset, rare or technical words will appear unchanged inside square brackets such as [isthmus]. For those, a full pronouncing dictionary or a grapheme-to-phoneme model would be needed. Everything here runs offline in your browser, so your text never leaves the page.