DEPARTMENT OF SPEECH, HEARING & PHONETIC SCIENCES
UCL Division of Psychology & Language Sciences

Longman Pronunciation Dictionary

third edition, 2008
with The Longman Pronunciation Coach CD-ROM

Out now!

Visit the Longman Dictionaries site, with three video clips of me talking about the new edition.

What’s new in LPD3?

The third edition continues the excellent tradition of the previous editions, but with extensive additions and improvements.

  • 3000 added headwords
  • results of two new opinion polls
  • CD-ROM with the Longman Pronunciation Coach

New headwords

Among the new headwords are

  • proper names, e.g. Athenry, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bussell, Cruyff, Ericsson, Obama, Rowling, Sentamu, Tehachapi, Titchmarsh, Verizon, Whampoa, Zellweger;
  • terms relating to the internet, e.g. blogging, chatroom, digicam, eBay, Facebook, Google, podcast, Wikipedia, YouTube;
  • and thousands of other assorted new words, e.g. Asbo, bird flu, Botox, chav, latte, nanobot. Among words beginning fa-, for instance, you will now also find faddy, fade-in, fag-hag, fairness, fair-to-middling, fakie, falling-off, falling-out, fan-assisted, fanciable, fancy-dress, Fannie Mae, fantasist, farthermost, fat-free, fault-tolerant, fava.

As in previous editions, non-English words come with the foreign-language phonetics as well as an appropriate anglicization: among the new additions are Abu Ghraib, al Qaeda, haram, niqab, and Sharm-el-Sheikh (Arabic), Ahmadinejad (Farsi), Benfica (Portuguese), Federer (German), gaijin and sudoku (Japanese), kimchi (Korean), mojito (Spanish), Putin (Russian), qi and Qingdao (Chinese), Sarkozy and Taizé (French), Terfel (Welsh), Tórshavn (Faroese).

Preference polls

In addition to the pronunciation preference polls reported in the previous edition, there are now also polling results from two more polls, both conducted on-line:

  • for AmE, a survey conducted by Prof. Bert Vaux, including among others the words almond, asterisk, caramel, chromosome, Presley, Thanksgiving and thespian;
  • for BrE, a survey conducted by Pearson Education and the author, including among others the words contribute, dissect, kilometre, liquorice, omega, tinnitus and tune. (more...)

CD-ROM
with the Longman Pronunciation Coach

The CD-ROM bundled with the dictionary includes

  • spoken versions of every headword, in BrE and AmE
  • the entire text of the dictionary, on-screen
  • a Self-Study Lab (interactive exercises with feedback)
  • a Teachers’ Resource Centre with worksheets and suggestions for classroom activities

Ask Professor Wells


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  • We welcome suggestions of possible additional items for inclusion in future editions, and notification of any errors.

Publisher’s synopsis

  • Need help with pronunciation? The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary
    • helps students with over 225,000 pronunciations in both British and American English, using the International Phonetic Alphabet
    • helps students with intonation by showing the stress patterns of thousands of compounds and idioms
  • User-friendly graphs show the preferred pronunciations of British and American speakers, based on extensive research by Professor Wells
  • NEW - now with the Longman Pronunciation Coach CD-ROM
    • Students can listen to the pronunciation of all entries in British and American English, then record and check their own pronunciation
    • Self Study Lab — Students can learn the International Phonetic Alphabet and practise their pronunciation with thousands of interactive exercises and feedback from Professor Wells
    • Teachers’ Resource Centre provides you with downloadable exercises for use in class