# CMU Pronouncing Dictionary **Domain:** Speech Technology / Computational Linguistics / Lexical Resources **Doc Type:** Resource Node **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[wiki/Pronunciation Lexicon|Pronunciation Lexicon]], [[wiki/Phonological Representation|Phonological Representation]], [[wiki/Prosody and Syllabification|Prosody and Syllabification]], [[wiki/Corpus Engineering|Corpus Engineering]], [[wiki/McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme|McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme]] --- ## Definition **The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, commonly called CMUdict, is a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English maintained by Carnegie Mellon University.** It represents pronunciations with ARPABET phoneme symbols and stress markings. ## Computational Role CMUdict supports speech recognition, speech synthesis, rhyme analysis, syllable estimation and other systems that need a mapping from written forms to sound structure. Multiple pronunciations can be associated with one orthographic entry. ## Project Context `wordlist cmudict` appears in the surviving source-directory structure described in [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]]. The project combined third-party pronunciation material with its own derived rhyme, phrase and indexing layers. The presence of a pronunciation source does not by itself establish the project's exact rhyme algorithm. It does establish part of the lexical substrate from which phonological representations could be built. ## Key Insight **CMUdict supplies a reusable bridge from spelling to structured sound, but downstream systems still determine how pronunciation becomes rhyme, meter or retrieval.** ## See Also [[wiki/Pronunciation Lexicon|Pronunciation Lexicon]], [[wiki/Phonological Representation|Phonological Representation]], [[wiki/Approximate Phonological Matching|Approximate Phonological Matching]], [[wiki/Prosody and Syllabification|Prosody and Syllabification]], [[wiki/Corpus Engineering|Corpus Engineering]] ## Sources / Provenance - Carnegie Mellon University, CMU Pronouncing Dictionary.