CUBE Dictionary
CUBE (CUrrent British English) is a free online pronunciation dictionary, available at www.cubedictionary.org. Co-edited by myself and Péter Szigetvári, CUBE has the most modern transcriptions and includes many up-to-date names and terms, such as Bitcoin, Brexit, Kim Jong Un, Markle, WhatsApp and Xi Jinping.
Being a pronunciation dictionary, CUBE includes no definitions; it gives only one recommended pronunciation per entry, and is currently limited to British English. But it has a wide range of search capabilities and options which make it uniquely helpful to teachers, learners and researchers. A number of these features are demonstrated in this short video:
Timings for the features explained are as follows:
1:25 Results can be displayed in alternative transcription systems
2:09 Words are linked to recordings in context, courtesy of the site Youglish
4:07 You can request missing words to be added (usually within 24 hours)
4:39 Part-word searches
5:01 Word edge searches
5:35 Results can be sorted by frequency of occurrence (on the internet)
6:55 You can search for sounds rather than spellings, using normal ASCII characters
8:02 You can search for sound categories (eg vowels, consonants, fricatives, nasals)
8:49 You can search for for minimal pairs
CUBE has still other capabilities, which can be explored via its various explanatory pages. The user can search by syllable count, and by stress pattern. A wide range of grammatical features can be specified or excluded when making searches. Some accent variations can be shown.
We hope you enjoy exploring CUBE. If you have comments or suggestions, there’s a Comment button on the homepage; you can also leave comments here, or on the video at YouTube.
To all my English teacher / student friends – this is a fantastic resource. Watch the 10 minute introductory video and then explore!
CUBE provides a more up-to-date picture of British English pronunciation than any other dictionary. It allows searches to be carried out using fine-grained phonological criteria, detailed grammatical features and morphological structure. It provides information on the frequency of individual words and particular phonological patterns. No other similar database comes close to boasting this range of features.
