Phnordle

IPA cheat sheet

Every sound the game uses, with the name the cheat sheet gives it. Greyed rows have no key: ʔ is on the sheet, but American dictionaries do not transcribe the glottal stop in ordinary words, so no word could use it. One key differs from the sheet: ɫ is its l, written dark as the source dictionary writes it.

How to play

Guess the IPA transcription of a hidden English word in 6 tries. You type phonemes, not letters — each tile is one sound, so and each fill a single tile.

right phoneme, right spot   right phoneme, wrong spot   not in the word

Every key shows an example word for its sound. Guesses must be the real pronunciation of some English word of the same length.

Switch the keyboard to IPA chart to type from the real chart layout — consonants by place and manner, vowels placed in the vowel quadrilateral, with a separate view for the diphthongs and their glides.

Two symbols follow the chart rather than the source dictionary: ʌ is the stressed vowel of “cup”, which the dictionary writes as ə, and ʍ is the voiceless w of “which”, which it writes as hw, and ɾ is the tapped t of “water”, which it writes as a plain t. The ɝ of “bird” is on neither sheet, so it is written ə + ɹ. The chart's glottal stop ʔ has no key: American dictionaries do not transcribe it in ordinary words, so no word could ever use it.

Big hint opens the cheat sheet: every sound with an example word and the name it goes by.

Pronunciations from open-dict-data/ipa-dict (MIT). Word frequencies from google-10000-english. Theme names nodding to ascii.krackeddevs.com.