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The English IPA Chart: All 44 Sounds with Audio

This is the full phonemic chart for British English: 44 sounds — 12 vowels, 8 diphthongs and 24 consonants. Each one shows the symbol, what the mouth does to make it, the spellings that produce it in real words, and example words taken from our own vocabulary lists with the transcriptions they already carry there. Press 🔊 on any word to hear it.

44 phonemesBritish English (RP)Audio on every wordReal example words

Written and reviewed by Vugar Novruzov, Academy Director · How we write our lessons

About the audio. Every 🔊 button uses your device's own British-English speech synthesiser — nothing is downloaded and it works offline. It is a synthetic voice, so treat it as a model of the sound rather than as a recording of a specific speaker, and check anything that surprises you against the written transcription beside it.

How to read a transcription

A phonemic transcription sits between slashes and records one thing: which sounds a word is made of, in order. It does not record who is speaking or how they feel. Two extra marks carry the rhythm — ˈ before the syllable with the main stress, ˌ before a syllable with secondary stress, and a full stop where one syllable ends and the next begins.

So photography is written /fəˈtɒɡ.rə.fi/ and tells you four things at once: four syllables, the main stress on the second, the first vowel reduced to schwa rather than the “o” the spelling suggests, and the ending sounding like “fee”. No amount of staring at the spelling gives you any of that. This is why every one of the 5,500 words in our vocabulary lists carries one.

Short vowels (7)

Short vowels are cut off quickly. Six of them carry stress; the seventh, the schwa, only ever appears where stress is absent — which is why it is both the most common sound in English and the one no one is taught first.

Long vowels (5)

The colon in /iː/ is not decoration: it is the difference between two words. British English also drops the written “r” after these vowels, so “car”, “door” and “bird” all end on a pure vowel.

Diphthongs (8)

A diphthong is one vowel that moves. The mouth starts in one position and glides to another without stopping in between, and it counts as a single syllable throughout.

Consonants (24)

English consonants come in voiced and voiceless pairs — /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /f/ and /v/, /s/ and /z/, /θ/ and /ð/, /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. The mouth position within each pair is identical; only the voice changes.

The sounds your own language will make hardest

Which of these 44 is difficult depends almost entirely on which sounds exist in your first language. Your ear stopped distinguishing sounds your language does not use before you were a year old, so the problem is genuinely perceptual rather than muscular — you are not failing to make the sound, you are failing to hear that there is a sound to make.

A few patterns come up constantly. Speakers of Spanish, Greek and Korean tend to merge /b/ and /v/. Speakers of Japanese, Korean and Chinese work hardest on /l/ against /r/. Speakers of Turkish, Russian, Polish and most Romance languages replace /θ/ and /ð/ with /s/, /t/ or /d/, because the tongue-between-teeth position simply does not occur in those languages. Speakers of Arabic and Slavic languages often lose the /iː/–/ɪ/ distinction because they have one vowel where English has two. None of these is a defect; each is a specific, fixable gap, and each has a set of pairs on the minimal pairs page.

Questions about the IPA chart

Why are there 44 sounds but only 26 letters?

Because the alphabet was borrowed from Latin, which had a different sound system, and English never expanded it. Five vowel letters have to cover twenty vowel sounds, so the same letter does different jobs in different words — the “a” of cat, car, call and about is four different sounds. The IPA gives each sound exactly one symbol, which is the whole point of it.

What is the difference between /iː/ and /ɪ/?

Length and tension. /iː/ is longer, and the tongue is higher and further forward with the lips spread; /ɪ/ is short and slack, made closer to the centre of the mouth. It is the contrast in sheep and ship, and there is a full set of practice pairs on the minimal pairs page.

What does the /ː/ symbol mean?

It marks a long vowel. /ɪ/ and /iː/ are different sounds, not the same sound said at two speeds, but length is one of the cues that separates them and it is the easiest one to control deliberately.

Why is the schwa so important?

Because it is what English does to every vowel it does not stress. It is the commonest sound in the language and it appears in almost every multi-syllable word — the second syllable of water, the first of about, the middle of camera. Pronouncing those syllables with their full spelled-out vowel is one of the clearest markers of a non-native accent.

Is this chart British or American?

British — Received Pronunciation, matching the transcriptions on every vocabulary page on this site. The main differences from General American are that the /r/ after a vowel is not pronounced here, /ɒ/ exists as a separate rounded vowel, and /ɑː/ appears in words like class and path.

Do I need to memorise all of these?

No. You need to be able to look a symbol up and know what it means, the way you use a dictionary rather than memorising one. In practice most learners absorb the twenty or so symbols that differ from their own language's spelling and never think about the rest.

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