A system of words identifying the letters of the alphabet and numbers. The system was reached through international agreement, and uses words chosen for their ease of pronunciation by people of all language backgrounds.

A set of phonetic symbols for international use introduced in the late 19th Century, constructed on the basis of the Roman and Greek alphabets with the addition of special symbols and diacritics to indicate fine distinctions in sounds, e.g. nasalisation of vowels, lengths, stress and tones.

(IPA). A set of symbols and modifying signs defined by the International Phonetic Association to provide a consistent and universally understood system for transcribing the speech sounds of any language.

System of representing sounds with symbols used in our course. The OED uses the same basic system with some small difference, but often bases the pronunciation on RP or Received Pronunciation, a preferred dialect of spoken English in Great Britain. Our course page has a connection to a Canadian website with practice words and IPA symbols.

the alphabet used by linguists to uniquely represent the sounds of the worldâ€(tm)s languages. A transcription of a word in the IPA can show every phonetic detail of how each sound is pronounced.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardized, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, foreign language teachers, lexicographers, and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.