English Pronouncing Dictionary

The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917. It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more pronunciations transcribed using a set of phonemic symbols based on a standard accent. The dictionary is now in its 18th Edition. John C. Wells has written of it "EPD has set the standard against which other dictionaries must inevitably be judged".

The precursor to the EPD was A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language by H. Michaelis and D. Jones, published in Germany in 1913. In this work, the headwords of the dictionary were listed in phonemic transcription, followed by their spelling form, so the user needed to be aware of the phonemic composition of a word in order to discover its spelling. A typical entry, given as an example in the Preface, was /'eksplə'neiʃən/ 'explanation' The user therefore had to have heard 'eksplə'neiʃən before they could discover that the word in question was written ‘explanation’. This format did not find favour, and a German-British work was in any case not likely to do well at the time of the First World War.

In 2015 an additional version of the 18th edition appeared: this is an app available for use on Apple’s iPhone and iPad, sold through the Apple iStore.

All editions have been based on a single accent (or a single American and a single British accent in the case of the 15th to 18th editions). The American accent is named GA (General American), but the British standard accent has been given different names at different times.

In all editions the transcription used is essentially phonemic, but the symbols and the conventions for their use have varied from time to time.

At the time of the publication of the 16th Edition, a CD-ROM disk (compatible with Windows but not with Apple computers) was produced which contains the full contents of the dictionary together with a recording of each headword, in British and American pronunciation. The recorded pronunciations can be played by clicking on a loudspeaker icon. A “sound search” facility is included to enable users to search for a particular phoneme or sequence of phonemes. Most of the recordings were made by actors or editorial staff. The recordings were completely revised for the 18th Edition.

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