---
title: "IPA — what it means · NoaLingua"
description: "The International Phonetic Alphabet gives every sound one symbol, whatever the spelling. How to read it, and why a dictionary bothers with it."
url: "https://noalingua.com/glossary/ipa/"
language: "en"
modified: "2026-08-17"
license: "CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---
Glossary

# IPA — the NoaLingua glossary

The International Phonetic Alphabet is a notation in which every symbol stands for exactly one sound, regardless of language or spelling.

It exists because ordinary spelling is an unreliable guide to pronunciation — English "though", "through" and "tough" being the standard demonstration. IPA writes what is actually said: /ðəʊ/, /θruː/, /tʌf/.

For a learner its value is in the distinctions your own language does not make. If your first language does not separate two vowels that the target language treats as different words, you will not hear the difference reliably, and IPA at least tells you the difference is there.

In NoaLingua IPA appears on the word card when the downloaded Wiktionary pack has it for that word. Serbian and Croatian have no such pack at all, so IPA is unavailable for those two.

## Related terms

[Lemma A lemma is the dictionary form of a word — the entry you would look up, as opposed to the inflected form you actually encountered.](https://noalingua.com/glossary/lemma/)[Text-to-speech (TTS) Text-to-speech is software that reads written text aloud in a synthetic voice.](https://noalingua.com/glossary/tts/)[Speech recognition (ASR) Automatic speech recognition converts spoken audio into text.](https://noalingua.com/glossary/asr/)

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