Subject: SUMMARY: British English Pronunciation Dictionaries My apologies for a delayed response in sending out this summary. The standard disclaimers apply in that I'm no expert, but I've found the information gathered very helpful so I hope you do too. Tony [Robinson] * The Longmans Pronouncing Dictionary is universally held as the best paper dictionary. Longmans will sell the wordstar format typesetting tape to the pronouncing dictionary [or of their Dictionary of Contemporary English] for 750 pounds. However, this may require substantial work to clean it up into a machine usable form. Contact: Mr. Stephen Crowdy, Longman Group UK Ltd., Longman House, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex. * Two pronouncing dictionaries are available in computer usable form from the Oxford Text Archive: the "Daniel Jones English Pronouncing Dictionary" and the "The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English". Of the two, the latter has more followers. I now have a copy of both of these and I am quite satisfied with them. Contact: archive@uk.ac.ox.vax * CELEX, the Dutch Centre for Lexical Information, provides online access to a large relational database of lexical information for English, German and Dutch. The English part of this database contains IPA phonemic transcriptions for 60,000 English wordforms. Contact: CELEX@CELEX.KUN.NL or CELEX@HNYMPI52.EARN CELEX -- Centre for Lexical Information Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD NIJMEGEN, The Netherlands * Although not strictly relevant to the original query on British English, two other databases are worth considering for special tasks. The first is the 20,000 word NetTalk database which has the property that the phonemic and graphemic transcriptions are aligned so making it suitable for deriving letter to sound rules for synthesis. The second is the TIMIT database which contains the sampled speech from 630 talkers saying 6300 sentences, each of which is labeled for phone and word boundaries. A standard transcription for all of 6229 lexical entries is provided and a small amount of software allows comparison of pronunciation variation. Contact: ajr@uk.ac.cam.eng in the first instance. Thanks to all for their input: Anne Cutler Ted Briscoe Russell Collingham John Holmes Peter Roach Clive Souter Alan Morrison Roger Mitton Mark Huckvale Sue Browning Tony Simons Richard Piepenbrock Gavin Burnage