Place Name Pronunciation
Pronounce city and place names correctly, from Worcester to Cannes, with phonetic respelling and IPA.
Results
The 7ESL Place Name Pronunciation guide helps you say city and place names the way locals do. Search more than a thousand published place names to get the phonetic respelling, the IPA transcription and audio, with more places added as their pronunciations are verified.
Why place names are a trap
Place names are the oldest words in any language, and their spellings froze centuries before their sounds did. English is notorious for it - Worcester has two syllables, Leicester rhymes with Lester, Greenwich hides its W - and other languages return the favour when their cities appear in English text: Cannes, Marseille, Phuket and Krakow all read very differently from how they sound. Mispronouncing a place is harmless among friends and embarrassing everywhere else: in a travel booking call, a news report, a geography lesson or a job interview with a company based there.
How to use the guide
Type the place into the search box and open the matching entry. The respelling gives you the sound in ordinary letters with the stressed syllable in capitals; the IPA gives the precise form; the Listen button speaks it aloud. Where American and British English say a place differently, both variants are listed. Every entry links to other places starting with the same letter, which makes preparing for a trip - or a pub quiz - pleasantly fast.
Honest data, growing coverage
Place pronunciations come from curated sources combined with the GeoNames gazetteer, and entries are published once a pronunciation is attached and checked. Thousands more cities sit in the review queue and appear here as they are verified, so coverage grows week by week without the tool changing. If the place you need has not been published yet, the universal search on the How to Pronounce hub may still find it among names and foreign words, and the IPA Translator can transcribe any spelling phonetically as a fallback.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find the pronunciation of a city?
Search the city in the box and open its entry: you get a plain-English respelling, the IPA transcription and a Listen button, with US and UK variants where they differ.
Why do English place names sound so different from their spelling?
Their spellings were fixed centuries ago while the spoken sounds kept evolving. That is how Worcester became WUSS-ter and Leicester became LESS-ter; the entries give you the modern sound directly.
How many places are covered?
Over a thousand published place names at launch, with thousands more in the verification queue that appear automatically once their pronunciations are checked.
Where does the place data come from?
From curated pronunciation sources combined with the GeoNames geographical database (geonames.org, CC BY licence), which is credited on every place page.
Is the audio a recording of a local speaker?
The audio is generated from the verified phonetic form of the name, which keeps pronunciation consistent across thousands of entries. Where locals and outsiders genuinely differ, the entry notes both forms.
Includes data from the Open English WordNet and WordNet 3.1, used under their respective open licences.