How to pronounce names in English

Throughout the years we have posted on the online pronunciation dictionaries below, but we have decided to bring them to your attention once again to remind you of these useful tools, which might help you get around the pronunciation of difficult English or foreign names.

What's the correct pronunciation of these names: Rachel Weisz, Rebecca Romijn, Hermione, Granger, Joe Pesci?

The Name Engine provides the correct name pronunciations of athletes, entertainers, politicians, newsmakers, and more. Even well-known names are often pronounced in different ways, leaving you to wonder what the correct pronunciation is. You'll find the right answer here. Better yet, you'll actually hear the right answer.

Another site that can help us get around the problem of pronouncing difficult names is Pronounce it right, run by Patrizia Serra and Laura Mazzoni.

Patrizia and Laura have organised the names by categories and nationalities. In addition, they include categories like 'the newest 100 pronunciations' and even a pronunciation test.

Drop by Pronounce it right and explore it.

Also, do not overlook two great online pronunciation dictionaries, where you might also find how to pronounce a lot of names:

Pronounce it right

I recently discovered Pronounce it right, a different online pronunciation dictionary. This is how Patrizia Serra and Laura Mazzoni, the people behind Pronounce it right, describe it:

"Can you correctly pronounce celebrity names such as Aishwarya Rai, Keira Knightley or Agnès Jaoui, or Roberto Benigni? Now try with the French President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Pronounce it right, establishes order in the huge phonetic mess of global communications. Common people as well as media professionals often take a guess in pronouncing foreign names or overseas words used in everyday life.

As a result, all these mispronounced names become "official" thanks to "reputable" radio and television announcers. Now, you can hear the correct articulation of any foreign name with a simple click. Why live with a bruschetta awfully pronounced or a misspelled Zbigniew Brzeziński when it’s so easy to stop making a fool of yourself?"

Patrizia and Laura have organised the names by categories and nationalities. In addition, they include categories like 'the newest 100 pronunciations' and even a pronunciation test.

Drop by Pronounce it right and explore it.

Dictionary of collocations. Ozdic

Ozdic is an online dictionary of collocations which can be extremely useful for students at an intermediate level and above.

Students can improve their accuracy in writing with Ozdic, which will show them the words that go together and will help them sound more natural.

Students look up a word to find which words are used with it. Each entry is organized around a word and its collocates. The collocates are grouped by part of speech - adjective, noun, verb and so on.

Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary

Learning to use collocations correctly is a key aspect of the language learning process from the very beginning, but especially so from the intermediate level upwards.

Collocations are the key to fluent English. Learning words on their own may help us to communicate, but we must try and learn how words combine with other words so that our English sounds natural.

The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary can be a more than effective tool for those students who take this aspect of their English learning in earnest.

The Online OXFORD Collocation Dictionary gives us guidance on common word combinations (150,000 collocations for 9,000 headwords), offering more than 50,000 examples to show us how the collocations are used in context.

Omnilexica

Omnilexica is a free online dictionary.  Omnilexica defines itself as "search in all dictionaries at once".

I think this description makes justice to Omnilexica  as it provides definitions for all English words and expressions in both mainstream and specialised dictionaries together with examples, pronunciation, videos, quotes.

 

 Drop by  Omnilexica and type in any word or expression in the search box at the top and you will discover a dictionary with a difference.

H/T to Teaching English.

Dictionary of collocations

For Better English is an online collacations dictionary I stumbled on thanks to English for University Students.

A collocations dictionary allows us to learn how words can be combined in English to say what we mean, and say it naturally.

I would go as far as saying that For Better English is a unique online tool to explore the combination of words  together.

So far, our options to check out whether our collocations were correct were limited to running a Google Fight or simply typing the phrase to check in the search box of Google and draw our own conclusions from the number of hits we got.

I hope you find For Better English useful.

The Name Engine

What's the correct pronunciation of these names: Rachel Weisz, Rebecca Romijn, Hermione, Granger, Joe Pesci?

The Name Engine provides the correct name pronunciations of athletes, entertainers, politicians, newsmakers, and more. Even well-known names are often pronounced in different ways, leaving you to wonder what the correct pronunciation is. You'll find the right answer here. Better yet, you'll actually hear the right answer.

On the minus side we must say that The Name Engine is on the making, but if you badly need to know how to pronounce a name, you can ask The Name Engine to include it on the site.

Also, do not overlook two great online pronunciation dictionaries we have mentioned here, where you might also find how to pronounce names:

Language Guide: Great visual dictionary for lower level students

Language Guide is a great visual dictionary for Básico 1 and Básico 2 (elementary) students, although the fact that it comprises so many aspects and objects of everyday life makes Language Guide suitable for all language students, regardless of their level.

Language Guide is divided into several sections:
Writing (the alphabet); Numbers; The body; Food; Nature; Clothing; Animals; The house; Transportation;
and Miscellaneous: The Family, Tools, School, Space, The Farm,  Electronics, Photography, Construction, Money, History, Fantasy, Communication, Art, Music, The City, Law & Order,  Shapes, Games, Military, Religion, Computers, The Office, Babies, Kids

To use it, simply click on a category and place the cursor over a picture. The spelling of the word will come up on the screen and you will hear how the word is pronounced.

You can also click on options and select the quiz mode, which will enable you to test yourself about the vocabulary items displayed.

 

Lingro

Lingro looks like the perfect online dictionary. Russell Stannard has informed about it in his May newsletter.

The idea behind Lingro is that we write in the box the address of the website we want to read (step 1). After that, if we come across some vocabulary item we don't know, simply by clicking on them we get an online definition (step 2).

This tool can prove extremely useful when reading online articles with a heavy vocabulary load, such as some of the articles we sometimes publish on this blog.

Give Lingro a try to gauge for yourself  how useful this tool is.

Memidex -online English dictionary

A few days ago, Larry Ferlazzo let us know about Memidex, an online English dictionary.

Memidex offers the same features as a standard dictionary -definitions, pronunciation, example sentences- and much more, as it tells us almost everything we want to know about a word: class, variations in spelling, synonyms, antonyms and, most importantly, its etimology.

Memidex is a very comprehensive dictionary that compiles information from other online resources.

Qwiki

Qwiki is a multimedia encyclopedia containing more than three million entries. Qwiki publishes narrated, illustrated, interactive reference entries. To use Qwiki, enter a topic in the search box or select a topic from the featured topics on the homepage. Then watch, listen, and read the Qwiki entry for that topic. Below your chosen Qwiki you will see a selection of related Qwiki entries. You can also find related materials by clicking the "Q" symbol that appears at the end of the Qwiki play bar.

And as the "wiki" in Qwiki implies, registered users can suggest videos and images to improve the reference entries. In the future registered users will be able to create their own Qwiki entries.

Qwiki could be a fantastic way for students to spot all kinds of information. For a lot of "standard" curriculum topics, Qwiki's entries provide a more engaging format for learning about those topics than that offered by textbooks.

Checking grammar and collocations

Phras.in can be a really interesting site that allows us to check two different ways of saying the same thing, so that we can decide which is most likely to be right.

If you type the two different ways of expressing something into the two fields, the site checks these through Google and shows you which is the most popular. This is a great way to check, for example, paired sentences with common mistakes. Also it is great to check collocations and find out whether you have the correct combinations of words or how popular different collocations are.

On top of that, it shows you the context in which it found the examples, so you can reinforce their learning by seeing some examples of the phrase used correctly in context.

So if you aren't sure whether to say 'do my bed' or 'make my bed', or you don't remember whether it is 'housework' or 'houseworks', Phras.in is the online collocation dictionary for you.

I found this site through Nik Peachy's QuickShout.

Pronunciation Dictionary

Study strategy:
Pronouncing English words correctly is essential for effective communication. Spanish speakers show a tendency to read English words the way they are written, as we do in Spanish, which results in endless difficulties to make ourselves understood.

It is always a good study idea to compile vocabulary lists to memorise and revise new words and expressions. The books of Modules 1, 2 and 3 of That's English! bring vocabulary lists at the back. However, as well as learning the meaning of new (and old) words, we must make sure that we know how to pronounce them.

howjsay.com is an extraoridinary online pronunciation dictionary that can help us pronounce words and names correctly. We must try and get into the habit of checking the pronunciation of new words.



Forvo is a similar online dictionary, but it is a bit more complicated to use as it gives us the option of pronouncing words in lots of different languages.