About this tool
Turn your name into a shareable pronunciation card with syllable breaks, a plain-English respelling, stress marking and NATO letter spelling.
The Name Pronunciation Guide Builder turns a name into a shareable card containing four things: the syllable breaks, a plain-English respelling with the stressed syllable in capitals, the letter-by-letter spelling in the ICAO/NATO alphabet, and a list of the spelling patterns readers usually get wrong. The respelling uses open and closed syllable rules — Priya becomes PREE-yuh, Aarav becomes AH-ruhv — and you can override it with your own version at any point. Paste the finished card into an email signature, a LinkedIn bio or a first-day introduction.
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Plain-English syllables anyone can read, rather than IPA characters most people cannot.
The stressed syllable is capitalised, which is the single detail most guides leave out.
Alfa, Bravo, Charlie — the ICAO alphabet, unchanged since 1956 and understood worldwide.
Break it into syllables, respell each syllable the way an English reader would sound it out, and capitalise the stressed one — PREE-yuh, AH-ruhv, ROH-huhn. Hyphens between syllables and capitals for stress carry more information to a general reader than IPA symbols do.
It is the ICAO spelling alphabet: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. It has been the international standard since 1956 and is used by aviation, shipping and emergency services.
Mostly four patterns: the h in kh, gh, bh, dh and th marks a puff of air rather than a separate sound; a final a is a short uh that English speakers tend to drop; ph is an aspirated p in many names, not an f; and doubled vowels such as aa and ee are one long sound, not two syllables.
It is increasingly common and costs one line — for example "Priya (PREE-yuh)". It saves colleagues the awkwardness of guessing, and it is far more effective than correcting people one at a time after the fact.