Pronunciation spelling

A pronunciation respelling is a regular phonetic respelling of a word that does have a standard spelling, so as to indicate the pronunciation. Pronunciation respellings are sometimes seen in dictionaries.

This should not be confused with pronunciation spelling, which is an ad hoc spelling of a word that has no standard spelling. Most of these are nonce coinages, but some have become standardized, e.g. gonna to represent the pronunciation of going to, as in I'm gonna catch you.

Pronunciation spellings may be used informally to indicate the pronunciation of foreign words or those whose spelling is irregular or not sufficient to deduce the pronunciation. This is called respelling. In such cases, typeface, punctuation or letter case may also be used, e.g. to indicate stress or syllabication:

This offers a sometimes intuitive alternative to systems like the International Phonetic Alphabet, which offer precise descriptions but need to be learned. However, it relies on the writer's encoding mapping to the same phonemes as the reader's; e.g.

might be adequate for a non-rhotic reader but not a rhotic one.

Pronunciation spellings are frequently used in narratives to represent nonstandard dialects or idiolects, often to create an impression of backwardness or illiteracy. That is called literary dialect, often called eye dialect, but the latter term used to be applied only if the resulting pronunciation is the same as the standard one:

Pronunciation spellings as deliberate misspellings may be used for humorous effect. The origin of the word okay is disputed, but the most common view is that it derives from "Oll Korrect", an 1830s comical spelling of "All Correct".

Such spellings may also be used for branding, e.g., "Lite" foods, Froot Loops. See also sensational spelling.

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