We’re extremely proud to announce that the Visual Thesaurus now offers accurate, high-quality audio pronunciations for every single word in our database — all 150,000 of them! This was a mammoth undertaking, and the results are unequaled by any online resource, both in terms of quality and quantity.
The Language Log provides additional details:
Visual Thesaurus enlisted the help of some vocally talented freelancers to make recordings for the 150,000 words and phrases in VT’s lexical database (in turn drawn from WordNet). To my knowledge, no phonetic recording project of this scope has ever been attempted for an English-language online reference. As I mention in the announcement, we’re talking about 55 hours of recorded speech, all done in tiny chunks averaging about 1.3 seconds. It turned out that the ideal candidates for this sort of freelance project were performers with a background in opera — for their vocal stamina, attention to the details of enunciation, and most of all, knowledge of IPA. As it happens, just about every opera singer and coach needs to be familiarized with IPA in order to sing in non-native languages, using phonetically rendered libretti.
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