American and British English pronunciation differences

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Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into

• differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
• differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) to represent AmE.

In the following discussion:

• superscript ^A2 after a word indicates that the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE.
• superscript ^B2 after a word indicates that the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE.
• superscript ^A1 after a word indicates that the pronunciation given as BrE is also the most common variant in AmE.
• superscript ^B1 after a word indicates that the pronunciation given as AmE is also the most common variant in BrE.