Guides

Short guides to reading and typing phonetic symbols and special characters.

• What is IPA? Meaning and history of the International Phonetic Alphabet

  An introduction to IPA: its purpose, origins and milestones, pronunciation notation, and ways to read and type it.

• How to read English IPA

  A plain guide to the IPA in English dictionaries: vowels, diphthongs, consonants and stress.

• The kinds of IPA symbols: consonants, vowels and diacritics

  How the IPA chart is organised: pulmonic and non-pulmonic consonants, vowels, diacritics and suprasegmentals.

• How to type accented letters on Windows, Mac and phones

  Ways to type é, ü, ñ, ç and other accented letters on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.

• French accents: choosing and typing é, è, ê, ç and œ

  Practice French spelling with accented letters, capitals, ligatures and examples you can type in the keyboard.

• German ä, ö, ü and ß: spelling examples and typing practice

  Type German umlauts and ß with examples, capital letters and shortcuts, and check the spelling after pasting.

• Spanish ñ, accents, ¿ and ¡: characters to keep when typing

  Practice Spanish ñ, accented vowels, ü and opening punctuation, with examples and Windows/Mac shortcuts.

• Copied characters look different: fonts and Unicode

  Troubleshoot missing glyphs, combining marks and input restrictions when copying symbols.

• Using Phonokey: a practical introduction

  A first-use guide to typing, copying, shortcuts and contacting Phonokey.

• Currency symbols and what they mean

  A list of world currency symbols (€ £ ¥ ₩ ₹ ₽ ₿…) with their names, ISO codes and writing conventions.

• Common math symbols and their names

  Names and meanings of everyday math symbols (± × ÷ ≠ ≈ ∈ ∀ ∑ ∫…), grouped by topic.