Pronunciation Respelling - Respelling

Respelling

Pronunciation spellings may be used informally to indicate the pronunciation of foreign words or those whose spelling is irregular or not sufficient to deduce the pronunciation. This is called respelling. In such cases, typeface, punctuation or letter case may also be used, e.g. to indicate stress or syllabication:

"Diarrhoea" is pronounced DYE-uh-REE-a

This offers a sometimes intuitive alternative to systems like the International Phonetic Alphabet, which offer precise descriptions but need to be learned. However, it relies on the writer's encoding mapping to the same phonemes as the reader's; e.g.

Föhn is pronounced "Fern"

might be adequate for a non-rhotic reader but not a rhotic one.

See also: Pronunciation respelling for English

for conventions used by various English dictionaries.