A respelling writes a pronunciation using ordinary English letters instead of phonetic symbols: serendipity is ser-uhn-DIP-i-tee. Hyphens mark syllable breaks, capitals mark the stressed syllable, and each vowel spelling always means the same sound — “oo” is always the vowel of boot, “uu” is always the vowel of book. It is less precise than IPA and readable without training, which is why every entry here carries both.
Why two notations for the same thing
IPA is exact. One symbol, one sound, no ambiguity across any language. It is also a notation you have to learn before it tells you anything, and most readers have not learned it — which makes it a pronunciation guide that does not guide.
A respelling is the opposite trade. It uses letters you already read, so it works on sight, and it pays for that with precision: it cannot distinguish sounds that English spelling has no separate letters for. Neither one is the better choice, so 35,490 entries carry both, plus the syllable line above them showing where the stress falls.
Read them together and each covers the other's gap. The syllable line shows the shape, the respelling gets you speaking, and the IPA settles any argument about which vowel is meant.
How to read a respelling
Three conventions, and then the vowel table below does the rest.
- Hyphens are syllable breaks. ser-uhn-DIP-i-tee is five syllables.
- CAPITALS mark the stressed syllable. There is exactly one in every word of more than one syllable, and none in a word of one — a single-syllable respelling is printed entirely in lower case, like “lahyt”.
- Consonants are read as you would expect: b, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, z, plus ch, sh, th, ng, zh. The only one that surprises people is “th”, which covers both the sound in thin and the sound in this — English spelling does not distinguish them either.
The five spellings that need explaining
Most of the scheme reads itself. These five are the ones readers ask about, and each of them is a deliberate choice rather than an accident.
| Spelling | IPA | Sound of | In our entries |
|---|---|---|---|
| ahy | /aɪ/ | light, my, island | lahyt · AHY-luhnd · KWAHY-ur (choir) |
| uh | /ə/ and /ʌ/ | about, cup, the second vowel of rhythm | uh-BOWT · RITH-uhm · KUHL-ur (colour) |
| oo | /u/ | boot, blue, queue | boot · kyoo (queue) · throo (through) |
| uu | /ʊ/ | book, put, could | buuk · KUUK-ee (cookie) |
| ur | /ɝ/ and /ɚ/ | bird, her, the ending of better | burd · KUR-nuhl (colonel) · THUR-oh (thorough) |
Why ahy and not eye
“Eye” is the clearest way to write the /aɪ/ sound on its own. It falls apart the moment anything is attached to it: “light” becomes “leyet”, which nobody can read. The sequence has to survive a consonant on either side.
“Ay” was unavailable — it already carries the different vowel of rain and pavement (PAYV-muhnt). Published dictionaries settled on “ahy” for exactly this reason, and it is the one respelling here that has to be learned rather than guessed.
The same logic explains “uu”. English writes both the vowel of boot and the vowel of book as “oo”, so a respelling that used “oo” for both would be no help at all in the one case where a reader actually needs help. Boot keeps “oo”; book gets “uu”.
What the respelling throws away on purpose
It is lossier than the IPA on the same page, in three specific ways, and knowing which three tells you when to look at the IPA instead.
It does not distinguish stressed from unstressed r-coloured vowels. Bird and the ending of better are both written “ur”, where IPA writes /ɝ/ and /ɚ/. It does not distinguish the vowel of cup from the reduced vowel of about: both are “uh”, where IPA writes /ʌ/ and /ə/. And it marks only primary stress, not secondary.
It also represents one accent. The transcriptions come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which records General American. If you say “bath” with the vowel of “father”, or do not pronounce the r in “bird”, the respelling is not describing your accent — it is describing a common one, consistently.
Finally, 47,627 single words have no CMU entry at all. Those get a syllable split derived from their spelling and no respelling or IPA, and their pages say so. Words like lakh and crore fall in this gap: entirely standard in Indian English, absent from an American pronouncing dictionary.
A worked example, symbol by symbol
Serendipity is transcribed /ˌsɛɹənˈdɪpɪti/ and respelled ser-uhn-DIP-i-tee. Reading them against each other is the fastest way to learn the correspondences.
The opening ˌsɛɹ is “ser” — the ˌ is a secondary stress the respelling does not mark. Then ən is “uhn”: an unstressed vowel, reduced, which is what “uh” always means. Then ˈdɪp carries the ˈ primary stress, so the respelling capitalises it: DIP. Then ɪ is “i”, and ti is “tee”, because /i/ at the end of a word is the vowel of see rather than of sit.
Once you have done that twice, the IPA stops being opaque. That is the actual purpose of printing both: not to make you choose, but to let one teach you the other.
Questions
- What does “ahy” mean in a pronunciation?
- It is the vowel sound of light, my and island — /aɪ/ in IPA. It is written “ahy” rather than “eye” because “eye” cannot take consonants either side without becoming unreadable, and “ay” already means the different vowel of rain.
- What is the difference between “oo” and “uu”?
- “oo” is the long vowel of boot and blue; “uu” is the short vowel of book and put. English spells both with the letters oo, which is precisely why a pronunciation guide has to separate them.
- Which accent do your pronunciations show?
- General American, because that is what the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary records. It is stated rather than hidden: a dictionary that presents one accent as the pronunciation is making a claim it cannot support.
- Why do some words have no pronunciation at all?
- 47,627 of the 83,117 single words in the corpus are not in the pronouncing dictionary. Those entries show a syllable split derived from their spelling and print no IPA and no respelling. Inventing one that looked authoritative would be the only thing on the page a reader could not check.