Fontlex English
A font that hints at how English words are pronounced, for learners. The text box below holds
plain text; the font draws the hints, in any app that renders color fonts. Copy the text and you get the letters
you typed.
In words of two or more syllables, the stressed vowel is
bold and red and reduced vowels (the schwa of banana) are blue. In any
word, silent letters fade. A word whose stress moves between noun and verb
(record, present, object) takes its reading from the word before it: the,
a, my make it a noun, to, will, we a verb; with neither it shows only
what both readings share. An invisible character right after the word, which a tagger can add, overrides
that: U+FE00 for the noun, U+FE01 for the verb (in the sample, after new record and then
record). The switches above the text turn one kind of hint off; in other apps they are the
font's stylistic sets (ss01 silent letters, ss02 reduced vowels, ss03 stress).
Where the hints come from
The pronunciations are the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary's (American English). Each word's spelling is aligned
with its sounds, letter groups such as sh, ee and tion's ti taken as one
spelling of one sound, so a letter that spells no sound is silent: the k of knife, the
gh of night, the b of debt. The font lists the 30,000 most frequent words
that the dictionary has, about 96% of running English text; any other word is drawn plain.
How exact it is
| Text | Checked | Drawn as listed |
|---|
| Listed words, alone, capitalized, in capitals and in sentences; unlisted words | 170,817 | 100.0% |
| Lines of this project's English documentation | 1,294 | 100.0% |
| This page's sample | 3 | 100.0% |
Each letter's glyph is compared with the lexicon's hint for it, in HarfBuzz (Chrome,
Firefox); Core Text (Safari) gives the same results.
How a font does it
Three OpenType passes. Right to left, each word's last letter gets a variant that says so; left to right,
its first letter. Then one rule per listed word, matching from a first letter to a last one with case
ignored, applies a hint to each marked letter. Words are matched whole, so often inside
oftentimes isn't. Hints depend only on the word, so they survive line wrapping, unlike constructs
that span words.
Base font: Noto Sans and Noto Sans Bold (SIL Open Font License). Pronunciations: the CMU
Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD-style license); word frequencies: wordfreq.