Phonetic Spelling Name Generator

A phonetic respelling breaks a name into syllables using ordinary English letter sounds and puts the stressed syllable in capitals: Siobhan becomes shih-VAWN, Joaquin becomes wah-KEEN, Hermione becomes her-MY-uh-nee. It is the same system newsreaders, wedding officiants and graduation announcers use on their scripts, and it is friendlier than the International Phonetic Alphabet because a reader needs no training to use it. The trick is to choose respelling chunks that can only be read one way: KAY not KA, EYE not I, OO not U, and 'uh' for the unstressed vowel in words like sofa.

The names that most often need a guide fall into predictable groups. Irish and Scottish Gaelic names (Aoife, Niamh, Caoimhe, Tadhg) use spelling rules unfamiliar to English readers. Names from Spanish, French, Polish, Vietnamese and Chinese have consonants that English maps differently, so Ximena, Thibault, Wojciech, Nguyen and Xu all trip people up. Greek-derived names such as Persephone and Calliope have a final -e that is pronounced. And a small set of English aristocratic surnames (Cholmondeley, Featherstonehaugh, Beauchamp) are famous for sounding nothing like they look.

Each entry above pairs the name with a respelling that a stranger could read cold at a lectern. Use them for roll call, event scripts, name badges, podcast intros, character sheets, or when settling a family argument about how Grandma's name is really said.