Easy IPA, Complete With Diacritics

Q: Is there a quick and easy way to include standard characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) into files or e-mails that I'm working on?

Jon Yaeger, Leipzig, Germany

A: In our first Toolkit entry, we alerted you to CopyPasteCharacter.com, a neat service for quickly adding unusual characters to your writing. For people who find they occasionally need a tilde or other infrequently used grapheme, visiting the site is a lot quicker than digging out a list of keyboard shortcuts.

A reader immediately wrote in asking if a similar tool existed for using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is heavily used in linguistics. And, after some digging around, we found one that works.

The IPA Character Picker requires the use of Javascript, but that's something that should probably work on your primary computer already. It includes all of the standard IPA characters, but takes them to the next level by allowing you to add additional diacritics and symbols.

Because IPA characters, complete with diacritics, are a bit more complicated than, say, an umlaut, this service requires a couple of steps. Select the characters you want to use, copy them from the output field and then paste them into whatever file you're working on. It's a lot easier than the below image would have you believe.

Tools mentioned in this entry:

• IPA CHARACTER PICKER

More questions? View the complete Toolkit archive.