Welcome to SID

The aim of SID is to provide concise definitions of technical terms used in phonetics, phonology, speech and hearing science and allied disciplines. Where appropriate, SID aims also to give examples, provide illustrations and sound clips. For some terms, references for further exploration of a topic are also provided.

An older version of SID is still online here, but will not be updated further.

Using SID
Use the search box to find a term in the dictionary. This will produce a list of all the articles in which the term appears. If you wish to search head words only, then precede and follow your search term with a colon. So, for example, searching for blahdiblah could well produce a long list of results, but searching for :blahdiblah: will produce only the entry with blahdiblah as its title.

The search results are summaries of the articles and may not contain images, sound clips or cross-references. Click on the title of an article to see the full version.

You can also browse the dictionary letter by letter by hovering over the letters in the black panel above. If you find navigating the drop-down lists is a problem, simply click on the relevant letter to get an alternative menu.


Last updated: 2016-03-28