An English on-line dictionary
This form allows you to search a short (20,000) word dictionary of English.
Words are transcribed, marked for stress, number of syllables, part of speech,
and frequency. The transcription field is set up to accept regular expressions.
Feedback
This is very much a work in progress. If you have any feedback, please let me know.
Instructions
Search
Transcription
This dictionary uses a specific encoding for phonetic characters. The following
chart shows the definitions for the special characters used. Note that there are
some transcription errors in the dictionary!
Vowels
| Symbol | Example | Symbol | Example |
| @ | cat | E | bet |
| I | bit | U | good |
| O | toy | i | beet |
| e | bait | u | mood |
| o | mode | a | knot |
| Y | might | W | bout |
| c | ought | R | bird |
| X | butter | x | coda |
| L | bottle |
Consonants
We only list the special consonant symbols here.
| Symbol | Example | Symbol | Example |
| T | bath | D | bathe |
| S | bash | Z | measure |
| C | chin | J | John |
| G | sing |
Stress patterns
Stress patterns are represented as a sequence of left quotes (for secondary
stress), right quotes (for primary stress), and underscore (for stressless
syllables. For example, '_` represents the stress of a word like
ánecdòte (primary - zero - secondary).
Number of syllables
Enter a number.
Regular expressions in spelling and transcription
fields
The transcription field accepts MySQL regular expressions. These are defined as
follows (from the MySQL online documentation).
- '.' matches any single character.
- A character class '[...]' matches any character within the brackets. For
example, '[abc]' matches 'a', 'b', or 'c'. To name a range of characters, use a
dash. '[a-z]' matches any lowercase letter, whereas '[0-9]' matches any digit.
- '*' matches zero or more instances of the thing preceding it. For example,
'x*' matches any number of 'x' characters, '[0-9]*' matches any number of
digits, and '.*' matches any number of anything.
- The pattern matches if it occurs anywhere in the value being tested.
- To anchor a pattern so that it must match the beginning or end of the value
being tested, use '^' at the beginning or '$' at the end of the pattern.
How we're doing this
This program runs on an Apache web server. The interface is written in HTML
with error-checking in Javascript. The back-end is a PHP script that interfaces
with a MySQL database.
Mike Hammond