IPA
Below is a basic key to the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet. For the smaller set of symbols that is sufficient for English, see Help:pronunciation. Several rare IPA symbols are not included; these are found on the main IPA article.
For each IPA symbol, an English example is given where possible; here "RP" stands for Received Pronunciation. The foreign languages that are used to illustrate additional sounds are primarily the ones most likely to be familiar to English speakers, French, German, and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic, and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other smaller but well-known languages are used, such as Swahili, Turkish, and Zulu.
The left-hand column displays the symbols like this: Template:Audio-pipe. Click on the speaker icon to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. All the sounds are spoken more than once, and the consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.

# Main symbols
The symbols are arranged by similarity to letters of the Latin alphabet. Symbols which do not resemble any letter are placed at the end.
- ^1 ^2  These symbols are officially written with a tie linking them (e.g. Template:IPA), and are also sometimes written as single characters (e.g. Template:IPA) though the latter convention is no longer official. They are written without ligatures here to ensure correct display in all browsers.

# Diacritic marks
All diacritics are here shown on a carrier letter such as the vowel a.

# Brackets
Two types of brackets are commonly used to enclose transcriptions in the IPA:
-  indicate the phonetic details of the pronunciation, regardless of whether they are actually meaningful to a native speaker. This is what a foreigner who does not know the structure of a language might hear. For instance, the English word lulls is pronounced Template:IPA, with different el sounds at the beginning and end. This is obvious to speakers of some other languages, though a native English speaker might not believe it. Likewise, Spanish la bomba has two different b sounds to foreign ears, Template:IPA, though a Spaniard might not be able to hear it. Omitting such detail does not make any difference to the identity of the word.
- /Slashes/ indicate phonemes. That is, changing symbol between slashes would make a difference in the meaning of the word, or produce nonsense. Since there is no meaningful difference between the two el sounds in the word lulls, they need to be transcribed with the same symbol: Template:IPA. Similarly, Spanish la bomba is phonemically transcribed Template:IPA.
A third kind of bracket is occasionally seen:
- |Pipes| indicate that the sounds are theoretical constructs that aren't actually heard. (This is called morphophonology.) For instance, if it is decided that the -s at the ends of verbs, which surfaces as either Template:IPA, as in talks Template:IPA, or Template:IPA, as in lulls Template:IPA, is actually the former (the difference between /s/ and /z/ is meaningful in English, unlike for example in Spanish), then that could be written |s|, for a claim that phonemic Template:IPA is essentially Template:IPA. This is not standardized; other conventions are Template:IPA, Template:IPA, and Template:IPA.
Lastly,
-  are occasionally used to represent the orthography: , .