Phonetic Spelling of English Words and Text

The syllable in capitals is the stressed one: KUHM-fuh-tuh-buhl carries its weight on KUHM. In the other alphabets the stressed vowel gets an accent mark instead, as in ка́мфэтэбл. The mark can be switched off in the settings.

Before a vowel sound it is “thee” (the apple), before a consonant “thuh” (the book). With Real speech on, other short words weaken the same way — to becomes “tuh”, of becomes “uhv” — as they sound in a normal sentence; on their own they are said in full. Switch it off in the settings to see the dictionary forms.

Either. The UK/US switch changes the whole text: British English drops the r at the end of a syllable (car — “kah”), American keeps it. The card of every word shows both, the chosen one first.

Yes. The alphabet menu has Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Indonesian, Korean and Arabic letters. Each is written by that language’s own reading rules, so a Spanish reader reads it the Spanish way and a German reader the German way.

Paste the text and choose Word list: every word once, with its reading, the IPA and the British or American form you picked. Copy puts it on the clipboard as a table that lands in rows and columns in a document or a spreadsheet, and Print puts just the reading on paper, without the rest of the site.

Paste the lyrics and choose Line by line: every line gets its reading underneath, the English can be hidden, and the button next to a line plays just that line.

Tap Photo and pick a picture of a page, a screenshot or a sign — or paste a screenshot straight into the text field. The text is recognized in the browser; the first time, the recognition model is downloaded.

The pronunciation comes from the CMU dictionary of about 134,000 English words. For a word it lacks, the stress is placed by the rules of English suffixes and the word is marked so you can check it by ear. Words spelled alike but read differently — a record, to record — are read from the words around them, and the card lets you pick the other reading.

A neural British or American voice on our server that sounds the same on every device — useful when a phone or computer has no good English voice of its own. Without Premium the number of HD plays a day is limited, with Premium it is much higher. The device voice is always available.