English Dictionary Online — definitions, pronunciation & synonyms

IPA stands for the International Phonetic Alphabet, a system where every symbol maps to exactly one sound. English uses roughly 44 of these sounds — about 24 consonants and 20 vowels — which is why spelling and transcription rarely match letter for letter.

A few conventions make any entry readable:

• Slashes — pronunciations sit between / /, a broad phonemic transcription rather than a narrow, region-specific one.
• Stress marks — a raised tick ˈ comes before the strongest syllable and a low tick ˌ before a secondary stress, as in /ˌɛfɪˈkeɪʃəs/ (efficacious). Wrong stress is the biggest cause of being misunderstood.
• Length — a colon-like ː marks a long vowel, so /iː/ is the ee in see while /ɪ/ is the short i in sit.
• Schwa — /ə/, the relaxed vowel in the first syllable of about, is the most common sound in English and fills almost every unstressed syllable.

Read a transcription sound by sound, not as a whole word, then press the audio button to hear a native speaker and copy the rhythm. When both a UK and US recording exist, compare them — the clearest difference is usually whether the /r/ after a vowel is pronounced.

Synonyms are words with a similar meaning; antonyms are words with the opposite meaning. A thesaurus is simply an index of those relationships, and this tool builds one on the fly, ranking candidates by how strongly they associate with your search.

The trap is treating synonyms as interchangeable. They almost never are — each carries its own connotation and register. Slim flatters where skinny criticises; inexpensive is neutral where cheap hints at poor quality. Read the definition before you swap a word, and prefer the plainest option that fits.

Antonyms come in distinct types worth recognising:

• Gradable — opposites on a scale, like hot and cold, with room in between.
• Complementary — strict either/or pairs, like alive and dead.
• Relational — two sides of one action, like buy and sell, or teacher and student.

Because every synonym and antonym is a clickable chip, you can jump straight into a candidate's own entry, check its senses and example sentences, and confirm it means exactly what you intend before committing it to your writing.

Rhyme is about sound, not spelling, so the results are drawn from phonetic data. Cough and off rhyme even though they look nothing alike, while though and cough do not. Three related lists answer three different questions:

• Perfect rhymes — the stressed vowel and every sound after it match, as in nation / station or play / away. These are the strongest, most song-friendly matches.
• Near-rhymes (also called slant, half, or imperfect rhymes) — an approximate match sharing a vowel or a final consonant, like shape / keep or worm / swarm. Poets and songwriters lean on them to stay fresh and dodge predictable couplets.
• Sounds-like — words pronounced almost identically, which surfaces homophones such as their / there / they're and to / too / two.

The distinction matters: a homophone is effectively a perfect rhyme with its twin, but a rhyme is not necessarily a homophone. Use perfect rhymes to close a line cleanly, near-rhymes to keep long passages from feeling forced, and the sounds-like list to catch the spelling mix-ups a spellchecker quietly approves.

The three words look interchangeable but are not. To define a word is to state its precise sense; a definition is that statement; and the meaning is the wider idea a word carries, including tone and typical use. A good entry gives you all three at a glance.

Most words belong to more than one part of speech. Run is a verb (to run) and a noun (a run); light is a noun, a verb, and an adjective. That is why definitions are grouped under labels — noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection and determiner — so you can go straight to the sense you need.

Within each group, numbered senses separate distinct meanings, a feature called polysemy. Bank can be a place for money or the side of a river; set famously carries dozens of senses. When two words share a spelling but no relation, they are homographs.

The quickest way to lock onto the right sense is the example sentence beneath each definition: seeing a word in context resolves ambiguity faster than the definition alone, which is why every entry pairs the two.