phonetic

American  

[fuh-net-ik] / fəˈnɛt ɪk /

adjective

1. Also phonetical of or relating to speech sounds, their production, or their transcription in written symbols.

2. corresponding to pronunciation.

   phonetic transcription.

3. agreeing with pronunciation.

   phonetic spelling.

4. concerning or involving the discrimination of nondistinctive elements of a language. In English, certain phonological features, as length and aspiration, are phonetic but not phonemic.

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noun

1. (in Chinese writing) a written element that represents a sound and is used in combination with a radical to form a character.

phonetic British  

/ fəˈnɛtɪk /

adjective

1. of or relating to phonetics

2. denoting any perceptible distinction between one speech sound and another, irrespective of whether the sounds are phonemes or allophones Compare phonemic

3. conforming to pronunciation

   phonetic spelling

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Other Word Forms

• nonphonetic adjective
• nonphonetical adjective
• phonetically adverb
• unphonetic adjective
• unphonetical adjective

Etymology

Origin of phonetic

First recorded in 1820–30; from New Latin phōnēticus, from Greek phōnētikós “vocal,” equivalent to phōnēt(ós) “to be spoken” (verbid of phōneîn “to speak”) + -ikos adjective suffix; -ic

Explanation

Phonetic describes the way that spoken words sound. To sound out an unfamiliar word, you break it into its phonetic parts, saying each in the order in which it appears. When you use the word phonetic, you're talking about pronunciation, or the way language sounds. When you learn how to speak Chinese, for example, you're often taught both traditional Chinese characters and a phonetic alphabet, which helps people learn to correctly pronounce Chinese words. The Greek word for sound or voice is phone, and it's the root of phonetic, which was first used in the early 1800s.

Example Sentences

It asserts that phonetic dialogue is rarely convincing.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jan. 9, 2026

Many proudly refer to themselves as DINKs — using the acronym in English — or dingke, the phonetic translation in Mandarin.

From Los Angeles Times • May 8, 2024

The description of what the researchers termed a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” opens the possibility of conveying a much larger variety of information.

From Science Magazine • May 7, 2024

But Shane Gero, a marine biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and an author of the study, said it’s unclear whether sperm whales similarly turn their phonetic sounds into a language.

From New York Times • May 7, 2024

Later Sumerian cuneiform did become capable of rendering prose, but it did so by the messy system that I’ve already described, with mixtures of logograms, phonetic signs, and unpronounced determinatives totaling hundreds of separate signs.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond