---
title: "How to pronounce colonel | Murmur"
description: "Check colonel pronunciation with CMUdict sound tokens and stress, then practise two original sentences and download a voiceover audition worksheet."
canonical: "https://www.murmurtts.com/pronunciation/colonel"
---
[Murmur](https://www.murmurtts.com/)/[Pronunciation](https://www.murmurtts.com/pronunciation)/colonel

PRONUNCIATION / Work and business

# How to pronounce colonel

Check colonel pronunciation with CMUdict sound tokens and stress, then practise two original sentences and download a voiceover audition worksheet.

## The dictionary sound sequence

CMUdict lists this North American English pronunciation for **colonel**. Read each sequence from left to right. The numbers mark vowel stress: **1** primary, **2** secondary, **0** unstressed.

Dictionary variant 1

`K ER1 N AH0 L`

**Syllable estimate**

2 vowel nuclei

**Primary stress**

1st vowel position

[Check colonel in Merriam-Webster and listen to available dictionary audio](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colonel).

Syllable counts come from vowel tokens; CMUdict does not supply syllable boundaries here. Variant order follows the dictionary and does not rank correctness. This lexicon does not represent every accent or context.

## Use colonel in context

Colonel is a military rank and often occurs before a person's name in history, news, or fiction. The title can be important to a chain of command, so listeners need to hear it clearly. A respectful reading should avoid turning the rank into an unnecessarily dramatic character cue.

1. The colonel reviewed the supply plan before dawn.
2. A retired colonel helped the museum explain the campaign.

### A practice cue

Audition colonel with the person's full name and any neighboring ranks. Its spelling can encourage an unhelpful reading, so compare the generated title directly with your reference before judging the fluency of the whole historical passage.

## Read the sound tokens

Each example word below is a cue for the named sound, rather than a respelling of colonel. Unstressed vowels may sound reduced. These cues follow the [CMU phoneme-set key (Appendix A)](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aria/Papers/MastersThesis.pdf#page=115).

`K`sound in **key**consonant`ER`sound in **hurt**vowel`N`sound in **knee**consonant`AH`sound in **hut**vowel`L`sound in **lee**consonant

TAKE IT TO YOUR NEXT RECORDING

## Make an audition worksheet

Select a dictionary variant for your checklist. The two original sentences retain their normal spelling; this worksheet helps you review a recording rather than forcing a speech engine to use phonemes.

Copying and downloading happen in your browser. No script upload or audio generation is needed.

## Dictionary source

The phonemes on this page come from [CMU Pronouncing Dictionary](https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict/blob/74790861f652b15e4ac49015a90074ad62a27690/cmudict.dict). The dictionary maintainers acknowledge that errors and omissions can remain; check another source or a speaker when the pronunciation matters.

[CMUdict README](https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict/blob/74790861f652b15e4ac49015a90074ad62a27690/README) · [Included dictionary license](https://www.murmurtts.com/downloads/cmudict-license.txt)

Source version and checksum

Commit: `74790861f652b15e4ac49015a90074ad62a27690`

Dictionary SHA-256: `81917843c7f44ce2b094ac63873c2c7a4cf802040792c455ba3ca406891c3d22`

## Keep practising

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[Build a pronunciation test suite for local TTS](https://www.murmurtts.com/blog/pronunciation-test-suite-local-tts) · [Browse all word references](https://www.murmurtts.com/pronunciation)

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## Check the word in a real voiceover.

Murmur generates speech locally on Apple Silicon Macs. Try your audition sentences with your chosen model and voice, listen for pronunciation, and review the result before exporting. A dictionary sequence does not guarantee a model’s output.

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