Pronunciation

IPA is a writing system that uses one symbol per speech sound. It lets you read any word's pronunciation without depending on the spelling. For example, the English word "see" is written /si/ in IPA, telling you the exact sounds: an 's' followed by a long 'ee'.

CEFR is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. A1 is beginner, A2 elementary, B1 intermediate, B2 upper-intermediate, C1 advanced, and C2 near-native. The chip next to each word tells you roughly how common or advanced that vocabulary is.

A single vowel keeps the mouth in one position, like the 'a' in 'cat'. A diphthong glides between two positions, like the 'i' in 'my' (/aɪ/), which starts open and ends closer to 'ee'. American English has 11 single vowels and 5 diphthongs.

Three habits help most: listen many times, repeat out loud, and record yourself to hear the difference. This page is built around that loop. You hear the word, see its IPA tiles, slow it down if you need to, and record your version. Five minutes a day works better than long, rare sessions.

Yes. Guests can look up 10 words a day with no account. Free accounts get unlimited lookups, save favourites, and can load more example sentences for any word.

Word lookup works for 50+ languages including English, Spanish, Turkish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. The phoneme Explorer currently focuses on American English; British English is on the roadmap.

When you look up a word, the syllable line above the IPA tiles splits it with dots, like he·llo. The stressed syllable is bolded and underlined. Saying the stress correctly is often more important than getting every vowel exactly right.