Pronunciation

The modern pronunciations and stress patterns given in the original edition of the Dictionary were represented according to a system of notation devised by the first editor, Sir James Murray, and reflected educated southern English pronunciation at the end of the nineteenth century. This notation system was translated in the Second Edition, largely symbol by symbol, into an equivalent transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet (which had originally been devised slightly too late to be available to the Dictionary when it began publication in 1884).

Each pronunciation in the revised text is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), according to a revised model of Received Pronunciation devised by Dr Clive Upton of the University of Leeds, and the scope of this information has been extended to include a ‘standard’ U.S. pronunciation based on a model devised by Professor William Kretzschmar of the University of Georgia. Words from other varieties of English have been given pronunciations based on (but not identical in all details with) the models used by the principal historical dictionaries of World Englishes (such as the trisyllabic New Zealand term mahoe, originally from Maori, and the disyllabic Caribbean mahoe). The Dictionary does not aim to cover dialectal variation in pronunciation within each variety.

When the modern British English pronunciation of a word is a direct descendant of that documented in the First or Second Edition of the Dictionary, the differences are not systematically noted. However, when the current British English pronunciation differs from the earlier form, the pronunciation given in the earlier edition is recorded in an editorial note. Detailed information on significant historical irregularities and peculiarities in the pronunciation of individual words is given in etymological notes. This is extended where appropriate to include discussion of historical pronunciation (e.g. as evidenced by variant spellings), as at machete and Magdalen.