Look at this: [ə].
Do you see a phonetic symbol between the square brackets?
(You should see a schwa.)

The International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode

Displaying IPA symbols

For you to be able to display Unicode phonetic symbols correctly on your web browser,

• the browser must be Unicode-compliant (all current browsers are)
• you must be running Windows 95 or later, or, on a Macintosh, OSX; (otherwise, and for Unix or Linux, see advice from the Unicode site)
• you must have installed a Unicode font that includes the IPA symbols
  The list of such Windows TrueType/OpenType fonts currently available and that I recommend is as follows.
  • Arial with Windows Vista; not previous versions
  • Arial Unicode MS
  • Charis SIL (download) — an excellent font from SIL
  • Courier New with Windows Vista; not previous versions
  • Doulos SIL (download) - the familiar SIL Doulos font, now in comprehensive Unicode version
  • Gentium (download)
  • Lucida Grande with Mac OS X/Safari and later
  • Lucida Sans Unicode, (download) — blocky, but widely available (supplied with many versions of Windows)
  • Microsoft Sans Serif with Windows Vista and later; not previous versions
  • Segoe UI with Windows Vista and later
  • Tahoma with Windows Vista and later; not previous versions
  • Times New Roman with Windows Vista and later; not previous versions
  and
• the web document you are displaying must specify this font with either a style sheet {font-family} tag or an in-line <font face> tag.

The style sheet in the head of this document specifies the font Arial MS Unicode, or failing that Lucida Sans Unicode. There is also another version, with no font specified, that you can use to test fonts.

Inserting IPA symbols in web documents

There are several ways to insert Unicode IPA symbols into your HTML files: by using MS Word (97 and later), or by using a numeric code.

• • In Word, with a Unicode font selected, use Insert | Symbol (normal text) and scroll down the box until you find the character you want. Select it, and Insert.
  • With Word 2003 and later, you can alternatively type in the Unicode hex number (see below), select it, and do Alt-X. The character will appear.
  • If you are going to use the character frequently, it might be worthwhile assigning a Shortcut Key (macro) for it.
  • You can also use the program Character Map to find your character, then select, copy and paste it.
  • Or you can use a keyboard facility such as this.
  • Afterwards, save the document using File | Save as HTML. Word will automatically convert the character into the corresponding numeric entity (see next para) or the corresponding UTF-8 encoding.
• Alternatively, write direct HTML, referencing each IPA symbol using the code numbers listed below. You can do this using either decimal or hex numbers. To create such a "numeric entity", you put ampersand (&), number sign (#), the Unicode number for the symbol, and semicolon. If using hex numbers, you must place an x between the number sign and the number. For example, to include the velar nasal symbol, ŋ, which has the Unicode decimal number 331, write ŋ, or, since its hex number is 014B, you can alternatively write ŋ. To transcribe the English word thing, θɪŋ, write θɪŋ or, alternatively, θɪŋ. The browser will render these with the correct IPA symbols, always provided an appropriate font is available.
• Force the use of an appropriate font by including a font tag as mentioned above, for example
  • in your cascading style sheet, p {font-family:"lucida sans unicode";}, or
  • in the text, an in-line tag <font face="Lucida Sans Unicode">.

Unicode decimal and hex numbers for IPA symbols

The Unicode manual lists code numbers only in hexadecimal. Here they are listed with their decimal numbers as well.

Alphabetic | Spacing diacritics | Non-spacing diacritics | Arrows

Alphabetic

Top of lists

Spacing diacritics and suprasegmentals