conventions in pronunciation dictionaries

All pronunciation dictionaries make use of abbreviatory conventions to save space. Devices such as italicization, superscription, and parenthesization make it possible to cater for several different phonetic forms without retranscribing the whole of the variant pronunciation. The three currently available pronunciation dictionaries of English are EPD, LPD and ODP. They all exploit the possibilities of abbreviatory conventions in various ways, as do some general dictionaries. All these three dictionaries agree in using a transcription that is more or less phonemic. This in itself can be seen as a kind of abbreviatory convention. They do not explicitly symbolize sounds whose use is allophonic (particular phoneme realizations predictable in context). They therefore make no use, for example, of the symbol [], despite the prevalence of the glottal stop in modern British English as a possible realization of /t/ in certain environments (but not really obligatorily in any environment). They do not show allophonic vowel length, despite the very obvious difference in duration in pairs such as need—neat (which all three dictionaries transcribe as).They do not use the dark-l symbol [], despite the fact that /l/ is so pronounced except before a vowel sound. (One difficulty about introducing this symbol to a dictionary would be that any word that ends in /l/ is pronounced with a clear lateral if immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel, but with a dark