Text to Phonetic
Convert your text into simplified phonetic spellings to help with pronunciation
A quick respelling to help you say a word
English spelling is famously unreliable as a guide to pronunciation, so it can help to see a word broken into smaller pieces. This tool creates a simplified phonetic-style respelling: it swaps common letter groups for the sounds they usually make and inserts hyphens so you can read the word one chunk at a time. It is a rough learning aid, not a dictionary transcription, so use it as a nudge rather than an authority.
How to use it
- Type or paste a word, phrase or sentence into the Input Text box.
- Press Generate Phonetics.
- Read the outcome under Phonetic Spelling, then press Copy Result if you want to keep it.
Editing the input clears the previous result. The panel is labelled Simp-IPA, but the notation is a simple respelling, not the International Phonetic Alphabet.
What the tool changes
- All text is converted to lowercase and each word is then capitalised.
- The letter groups ph and gh become f, ti, ci and si become sh, qu becomes kw, kn becomes n and wr becomes r.
- A hyphen is placed after every vowel letter (a, e, i, o, u), which splits the word into chunks.
For example, navigation becomes Na-vi-ga-sho-n. The hyphens mark chunks made by the vowel rule, so they will not always fall on true syllable boundaries.
Situations where it is useful
- Helping a language learner sound out a long or unfamiliar word.
- Making a simple pronunciation note for a presenter or a name-card.
- Showing students how a few common spelling patterns represent sounds.
- Preparing text for a quiz on the difference between spelling and sound.
What it cannot do
The rules are few and applied blindly. Silent letters are mostly ignored, the letter c is not converted to a k sound, and the letter y is never treated as a vowel. The swap of gh to f is wrong for words such as ghost or night, and ti to sh is wrong in words like tiger. Hyphens can also be left before punctuation, for example after a word that ends in a vowel. Names, foreign words and unusual spellings need checking against a dictionary or an audio pronunciation guide. To reverse simple respellings, the Phonetic to Text tool covers a few of the same patterns.
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