British English dictionary app with spoken pronunciation

By Andrew90, 19 October, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hi all, just wondering if anyone knows of a British English dictionary app that allows you to hear how a word is pronounced after you’ve looked it up spoken by a human voice? :-) Might be a longshot but thought I’d ask anyway. Or just does anyone know if British English dictionaries in general if there isn’t one with spoken pronunciations available.

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By Unregistered User (not verified) on Monday, October 25, 2021 - 01:50

Hi!
Simply read with British voiceover any English text!
And you will have an enough good imagination of the pronunciation!
Cheers!

zeirus-fr
I appreciate your comment, but if I was going to do that, I wouldn't have posted the question. There are times when I want to know the british pronunciation of words or spellings. Particularly as (no offense to my American friends), but so much of the media today is produced in America, and British/Australian/NewZealand spell some words and pronounce words differently. Take Mom verses Mum for instance. Not bad, it is just how language has evolved in different areas of the world. Screen readers, majority of which are produced in America, so their pronounciations of some words may not be the way british pronounce them. Simply because American's and british have different ways of pronouncing some words, so a screen reader can only pronounce words in the way it has been programmed, so if a british programmer is coding the screen reader, words will be spelled or pronounced the way a british person would. Likewise, if An American was coding a screen reader, the words would be pronounced how Americans do. I have already tried out a couple of words with voiceover tonight after reading your comment, and I can tell you It didn't matter which voiceover language I used, all the words were pronounced the same no matter if I was using British, American, Australian, Irish, South African or indian english. Your comment wouldn't be helpful to say, a person studying linguistics or an author or a person wanting to audio record reading text for example.

You're welcome. I just noticed that Oxford English Dictionary (OED) received an update few days ago, which resulted in the app and its Definition text area becoming quite accessible and VO-friendly. Audio pronunciations have also been improved. It's the most up-to-date British English dictionary and the latest release contains the most recent Oxford 2021 updates, but is subscription-based -- around $19 per year I think.