Longman Pronunciation Dictionary

by J.C. Wells, Longman

Based on Professor Wells' Pronunciation Preference Internet Poll, this authoritative reference shows over 135,000 different pronunciations from British and American English, including technical vocabulary and proper names.

Genres: Reference, Language, Dictionaries, Linguistics

896 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1990

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperanto teacher. Until 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics at the University College London.

Reviews

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

tolle wörter, an manchen stellen aber etwas langweilig

[Paweł Dembowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good reference for British and American pronunciations, probably the only paper dictionary I have (and I have quite a few) that I actually still tend to use (online dictionaries are more convenient for looking up definitions but they usually have only one pronunciation for every word listed, if any, instead of the variety of variants this dictionary has).

[Albert. Sher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favourite reference book. I used it while studying an introductory university module in phonetics and phonology because part of the course involved doing broad transcriptions. I found in invaluable. I have the third edition of the book but I imagine this review would be equally applicable to this edition.

I still use it when I want to know how to pronounce a word I've only ever seen in print and it's rare that the word I'm looking up isn't in there. It contains the standard words you'd expect to find along with acronyms and words such as Quidditch. It's also great for settling those debates (which my boyfriend and I have) about how to pronounce a word. One of my favourite and most used books.