English Pronunciation Guide & IPA Converter
Type any English word or sentence and get its IPA phonetic spelling, syllable breaks, and stress marks instantly — no sign-up, works offline in your browser.
How this pronunciation tool works
English spelling is famously irregular — the letters ough alone have six different sounds (think though, tough, through, cough, bough, thought). Because of that, no single set of rules can perfectly convert spelling to sound. This tool uses a two-stage method to get close.
Stage 1 — dictionary lookup. The tool ships with a built-in pronunciation dictionary of several hundred of the most common English words, each stored with its hand-checked IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcription. If your word is in the list, you get an exact, authoritative result, marked with a green dot.
Stage 2 — grapheme-to-phoneme rules. When a word is not in the dictionary, the tool falls back to a letter-to-sound algorithm. It scans the word left to right, matching multi-letter spelling patterns (digraphs like sh, ch, th, and vowel teams like ea, oo, igh) before single letters, applies the silent-e rule that lengthens a preceding vowel, and reduces unstressed vowels toward the schwa /ə/. These estimates are marked with an amber dot so you know to double-check them.
Syllables and stress. Syllable count is estimated by counting vowel-sound groups (adjacent vowels count once) and subtracting a silent final e. The primary stress mark ˈ is placed before the strongest syllable using a simple heuristic: two-syllable nouns and adjectives usually stress the first syllable, while the General American and British (RP) toggles swap a few vowel qualities such as the a in bath and the rhotic final r. Treat the output as a study aid, not a substitute for a native-speaker recording.