IPA / Phonetic Symbols Cheatsheet

The International Phonetic Alphabet gives every distinct speech sound its own symbol, so that pronunciation can be written unambiguously regardless of language or spelling convention. This table covers the symbols that come up most in transcribing English and in general phonetics: the central vowels, the consonants English spells with digraphs, the stress and length marks, and a few common diacritics.

The schwa ə is the single most useful symbol here, because it is the most common vowel sound in spoken English and has no consistent spelling. It is the unstressed vowel in about, sofa, pencil, supply and problem — five different letters, one sound. English spelling gives no clue that these are identical, which is exactly the problem IPA exists to solve. Its r-coloured partner ɚ covers the vowel in butter and teacher in rhotic accents.

Several symbols cover sounds English writes with two letters. θ and ð are the two th sounds, and they are genuinely different: θ is voiceless, as in thin and bath, while ð is voiced, as in this and bathe. ʃ and ʒ are the sh of ship and the middle consonant of measure. ʧ and ʤ are the ch of church and the j of judge, and note that these are properly written as tied ligatures or as two symbols with a tie bar, though the single-character forms in this table are widely used and more practical for plain text. ŋ is the ng of sing, a single sound rather than n followed by g.

The suprasegmental marks are easy to get wrong. Primary stress ˈ is a vertical line placed before the stressed syllable, not an apostrophe, and secondary stress ˌ hangs below the line. The length mark ː is a pair of triangles, not a colon — using an actual colon is the most common IPA error in casual transcription and it breaks phonetic search and font rendering. Nasalisation is a combining tilde placed over the vowel, and rhoticity uses the hook ˞.

Two conventions worth knowing when reading transcriptions. Square brackets enclose a narrow phonetic transcription showing actual articulation, while slashes enclose a broad phonemic transcription showing only the contrasts that matter in a given language, so [pʰɪn] and /pɪn/ describe the same word at different levels of detail. And IPA has no Alt codes worth using — the practical routes are copying from a table like this one, a dedicated IPA keyboard layout, or the online IPA pickers that most phoneticians rely on. On macOS the Unicode Hex Input source lets you enter codepoints directly with Option held, which is the fastest native method.