English spelling is not phonetic so it can be difficult to guess the correct pronunciation of a written word. Dictionaries, course books, phoneticians and myself use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to write words phonetically and to teach the sounds of a language.

Some of the IPA symbols are familiar letters, others will be new to you. The schwa symbol /ə/ at the top of this page is just one example. To visualise these symbols you need a special font with a larger range of symbols. These fonts are called 'Unicode fonts' and this site uses Lucida Sans Unicode for Windows and Gentium for Macintosh. Lucida Sans Unicode comes with most recent Windows installations, but if you use a Macintosh you will need to download and install Gentium.

You will also need a browser which supports Unicode: version 4 or later of either Netscape or Internet Explorer. And you must have Windows 95 or later.

If the phonetic script is the same as (or similar to) the correct image, then you already have the font.

Instead, if it has boxes and fat bars in place of some characters, as in the image at bottom right, read on...

Click to download:

Lucida Sans Unicode (316 KB)
Gentium for Windows (633KB)
Gentium for Mac (541KB)

Note that if you have both Gentium and Lucida Sans Unicode installed, your browser will display this site using Lucida Sans Unicode. If you have neither, it will display text in Arial but it will not visualise all the IPA symbols.

If you download Gentium, please read and abide by the very reasonable terms of use for this free high-quality font.

After saving your downloaded font to disk:

In Windows

Go to START > SETTINGS > CONTROL PANEL
Double-click on FONTS
Go to FILE MENU > INSTALL NEW FONT
Navigate to the folder where you saved your new font
Select the FONT and click on OK.

In Mac OS X

Copy the font files (Gentium, GentiumAlt) into the ..\LIBRARY\FONTS folder of your SYSTEM DISK.

In Mac OS 9

Drop the fonts onto your (closed) SYSTEM FOLDER.

Displaying IPA characters using Unicode is a relatively new development. If you want to know more, a good place to start is John Wells's page on The IPA in Unicode, from which most of the information here was learnt.