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A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling ...
For English words and names, pronunciation should normally be omitted for common words or when obvious from the spelling; use it only for loanwords from other languages (coup d'etat), names with counterintuitive pronunciation (Leicester, Ralph Fiennes), or very unusual words .
For help converting spelling to pronunciation, see English orthography § Spelling-to-sound correspondences. The words given as examples for two different symbols may sound the same to you. For example, you may pronounce cot and caught , do and dew , or marry and merry the same.
The pronunciation with [f] was rare, and its use in current English is a historical accident resulting, according to Dobson, from the establishment of the spelling variant draft. [22] The words castle, fasten and raspberry are special cases
Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
As designated in Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation, the standard set of symbols used to show the pronunciation of English words on Wikipedia is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA has significant advantages over this respelling system, as it can be used to accurately represent pronunciations from any language in the world ...
Entry for "Herb" from Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, (London: Tegg, 1833), showing pronunciation without /h/ These tables list words pronounced differently but spelled the same. See also the table of words with different pronunciation reflected in the spelling.
So readers looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary may find, on seeing the pronunciation respelling, that the word is in fact already known to them orally. By the same token, those who hear an unfamiliar spoken word may see several possible matches in a dictionary and must rely on the pronunciation respellings to find the correct match. [4]