John Wells’s phonetic blog

The standard descriptions of English phonetics really fall down — it seems to me — when it comes to the sequence involving a voiceless plosi...

Dear Professsor Wells, I’m confused about the pronunciation of the prefix re- . When does it have the DRESS vowel? LPD says “if stressed thr...

For years I had been teaching people that speakers of rhotic accents pronounce an r sound wherever there is a letter r in the spelling, an...

Gwen Awbery writes I have a longstanding problem trying to get hold of a blank, basic vowel chart which would be compatible with OpenOffice ...

In the trailer for a television programme yesterday the voiceover invited us to join the presenter on what’s con\/ sid ered to be | one of t...

This political cartoon from yesterday’s Guardian (click to enlarge) may be pretty opaque to non-Brits today and will be opaque to everyone i...

I don’t know enough about the history of our spelling to be able to explain with certainty the oddity of having the letter o correspond to ...