Template:Respell/doc

This template is designed to be used to show the pronunciation of English words or names, using a simple respelling method at "Pronunciation respelling key". It is intended especially to clarify the name of the article in the lead section or introductory paragraph. The template provides a link to the key so that readers may easily look up how to pronounce the word. For example,


 * Worcestershire (, ), is a county located in the West Midlands region of central England.

The respelling key only covers English pronunciation, and should not be used for foreign names or words which have not been assimilated into English. Per the Manual of Style, it should follow the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and never be used in place of it. The example above used the pron-en template to format and link the IPA. If you need help transcribing the pronunciation into the IPA, please ask at Wikipedia talk:IPA for English.

This template accepts up to five values,. The penultimate and pre-antepenultimate cells are formatted small, so that when filled in all capital letters, the result is small caps. Therefore, when several unstressed syllables follow each other, they need to be placed together in a single cell. The template does not directly handle final stress. For that, you will need to format by hand, for example by using the sm template with lower-case letters, or tags with capital letters, within this template.

Examples
Here are examples of how to use the template for words with different numbers of syllables and different stress patterns:

Ambiguous readings
This transcription may supplement the IPA, but is not sufficient for general use. For example, MOW and TOW are poor transcriptions, because people will read them as rather than as. EYE/YE is generally not very legible in closed syllables, such as VYES for vice, which people will tend to read as either or ; if it is respelled VYESS to avoid the latter, the former reading becomes even more likely. In such cases, USdict transcription may be a better choice.