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In writing, 'phonetic spelling' is the use of writing system with a finite character set, where each character, or sometimes character sequence, has exactly one corresponding phoneme (sound), or sometimes sequence of phonemes. The usual writing system for English does not use phonetic spelling, as the same characters often represent different sounds; indeed, English has many pairs of ''homographs'', words that are spelled identically but pronounced differently (such as ''lead'' , as in ''lead paint'', and ''lead'' , as in ''to lead astray''). By contrast, Spanish uses phonetic spelling; a word's pronunciation is completely identified by its spelling (though the reverse is not always the case; indeed, Spanish, like English, has many pairs of ''homophones'', words that are pronounced identically but spelled differently).
Phonetic spelling is not necessarily a trait that a writing system either has or lacks; it is possible for one writing system to be ''more'' phonetic than another, even if neither is perfectly phonetic. Even in writing systems that are very phonetic, there are often exceptions; for example, the Spanish word ''jeep'' is pronounced , after the English word from which it derives, even though a native Spanish word spelled ''jeep'' would be pronounced .

Contents

See also

See also

★ Alphabetic principle

★ Spelling

★ Phonemic orthography

★ Phonetic transcription