Random quote

[pne]

"The dictionary is a big book that would let you look up the right spelling of a word if you knew how it was spelled in the first place."

Comments

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see an IPA to written English dictionary. :) I've never had any trouble with spelling even obscure words, but I just think it'd be fun to look things up.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

One problem with a "real IPA" dictionary is dialect-compliance. Not all lects of English have the same inventory of vowels, and possibly consonants (not sure about this). You could possibly end up with a dozen or more dictionaries, depending on whose speech you were trying to match. To remedy this, I'd suggest a dictionary using headwords in one of the broadly phonemic transcription systems already used in other dictionaries. There's also the matter of defining a user-friendly sort order for all the characters outside the normal alphabet, but that's a problem whichever transcription system you use.

[ubykhlives.livejournal.com]

One problem with a "real IPA" dictionary is dialect-compliance.

Yes, that's why I wasn't really being serious. Particularly in England, having only one such dictionary is totally impractical.

Not all lects of English have the same inventory of vowels, and possibly consonants (not sure about this).

Some dialects of English English only have [ŋ] as a marginal phoneme, and in some idiolects it's not a phoneme at all, being only an allophone of [n] before [g] (so "singer" rhymes with "finger" for these speakers).