Word.ws English Dictionary

Received Pronunciation

Received Pronunciation proper noun: the form of pronunciation of the English language traditionally spoken by the educated classes of the south-east of England, considered to be a standard (see received) for British English and used as such in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries.

Proper noun

Received Pronunciation

  1. The form of pronunciation of the English language traditionally spoken by the educated classes of the south-east of England, considered to be a standard (see received) for British English and used as such in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries.

Synonyms of Received Pronunciation

Origin of Received Pronunciation

Commonly attributed to Alexander John Ellis but already used earlier.

Words formed from Received Pronunciation

Questions about Received Pronunciation

What does Received Pronunciation mean?
Received Pronunciation means the form of pronunciation of the English language traditionally spoken by the educated classes of the south-east of England, considered to be a standard (see received) for British English and used as such in the pronunciation schemes of most British dictionaries.
What part of speech is Received Pronunciation?
Received Pronunciation is a proper noun.

Words near Received Pronunciation in the dictionary

  1. receivals
  2. receive
  3. receiveable
  4. receiveables
  5. received
  6. Received Pronunciation
  7. Received Standard
  8. received wisdom
  9. receivedness
  10. receivedst
  11. receiver

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Received Pronunciation (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Received Pronunciation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/received_pronunciation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.