ENGLISH PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY

ENGLISH PRONOUNCING DICTIONARY, short form EPD. A work of reference by the phonetician Daniel JONES, based on his Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language (1913). The EPD was published during the First World War by J. M. Dent (1917); it is one of the most influential ELT books ever published, is widely regarded as an institution, and is closely associated with the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics of U. College London, where Jones worked and where its revision was maintained for many years first by A. C. Gimson, then Susan Ramsaran. Their revisions appeared in 1924 (2nd edition: with supplement), 1926 (3rd: with revised introduction), 1937 (4th: enlarged and reset), 1940 (5th), 1944 (6th), 1945 (7th: with supplement), 1947 (8th), 1948 (9th), 1949 (10th), 1956 (11th: enlarged and reset), 1963 (12th: with supplement and phonetic glossary; with corrections and revisions by Gimson in the 1964 reprint), 1967 (13th: enlarged and reset), 1977 (14th: reset, with revisions and a supplement by Ramsaran in 1988). Cambridge University acquired the rights from Dent and in 1997 brought out the 15th edition, edited by Peter Roach and James Hartman. The dictionary is a pronouncing glossary that lists words and names in Roman letters followed by their equivalents (with variants, where appropriate) in a phonemic transcription that uses the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (in 1997, BBC Pronunciation) as a pronunciation model. There is an account in the introduction of the model and the notation. The 14th edition contains over 59,664 items, while the 15th has over 80,000. See PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION, PUBLIC SCHOOL PRONUNCIATION.