John Wells’s phonetic blog

You remember the man who took his torn trousers to the Greek tailor? The tailor asked, Euripides? Yes, said the man, Eumenides? Every now an...

The English spelling ah is “unambiguously a long open vowel spelling” (Carney). Apart from interjections ( ah!, bah!, hurrah!, pah! ), it i...

Jo-Anne Ferreira sent me a message saying she was hunting high and low for a Unicode font that has the labiodental flap. Can you help? The a...

The disturbing news of urban warfare in progress in Kingston, Jamaica, has led me to have a look at the website of the venerable local new...

I don’t know if this is happening to everyone else, too, but I keep getting emails purporting to be a Call for Papers for a conference calle...

In LPD one of the innovations I introduced (as compared with the then EPD) was a set of entries devoted to affixes and combining forms. This...

Llandudno Bay is flanked by two steep headlands sticking out into the sea, the Great Orme ɔːm and the Little Orme. As we gazed on the Grea...