Graduation forms ask for a phonetic spelling because the announcer has never met you and has a few seconds per name. The format nearly every commencement office asks for is the same: write your name in ordinary letters, split it into syllables with hyphens, and capitalise the syllable that carries the stress. Sophia Lamagna becomes soh-FEE-uh lah-MAHN-yuh.
That is the whole convention. The rest of this guide is about getting your own name into it accurately, including the parts English spelling handles badly. You can check any spelling against the pronunciation Studio, which breaks a word into syllables and shows where the stress falls.
Why the form asks at all
A commencement reader works from a card or a screen, one name after another, often several hundred in a row, in a hall with echo and applause. They cannot pause to work out an unfamiliar spelling, and they cannot ask you. Whatever is written on the card is what the room hears.
The spelling of a name is a poor guide to its sound even for names that look ordinary in English. Stephen and Stephan differ by one letter and by more than one sound. Colin has two accepted pronunciations. Names carried over from another language are worse, because the spelling follows the rules of that language rather than English ones, and names hold on to letters that stopped being pronounced centuries ago, in the same way the words covered in the silent letters guide do.
So the phonetic line is not a formality. It is the only instruction the reader gets, and it is the one moment in the ceremony that belongs specifically to you.
The format, in four rules
Use ordinary English letters. No IPA, no accent marks, no symbols. The reader needs something they can say at a glance.
Break every syllable with a hyphen. One hyphen per syllable boundary. Amara becomes uh-MAR-uh, not uhMARuh or uh MAR uh.
Capitalise the stressed syllable. Capitals are how you tell the reader which part to lean on, and stress is the single thing they are most likely to get wrong. Put one syllable of each name part in capitals.
Spell the sounds the way an English speaker would read them. Write the sound ee as “ee”, not as “i”. Write ah as “ah”, not as “a”. You are writing for someone who will read it as English.
The University of Iowa’s commencement guidance also asks students to avoid special characters, which is worth following everywhere: accented letters and apostrophes can be dropped or mangled by the systems the name passes through before it reaches the card.
The sound spellings to use
Consistency matters more than cleverness. These spellings read reliably for an English speaker.
| Sound | Write it as | Example |
|---|---|---|
| as in see | ee | Nina: NEE-nuh |
| as in sit | ih | Miguel: mih-GEL |
| as in say | ay | Renee: ruh-NAY |
| as in set | eh | Emma: EH-muh |
| as in father | ah | Omar: OH-mahr |
| as in cat | a | Sanjay: SAN-jay |
| as in go | oh | Sofia: soh-FEE-uh |
| as in saw | aw | Siobhan: shih-VAWN |
| as in too | oo | Yusuf: YOO-suf |
| as in book | uu | Fahad: fuh-HAD |
| as in cup or any weak vowel | uh | Amina: uh-MEE-nuh |
| as in my | eye or y | Kai: KYE |
| as in now | ow | Paulo: POW-loh |
| as in boy | oy | Moises: moy-SES |
| the ch in chair | ch | Wojciech: VOY-chek |
| the j in jam | j | Thiago: tee-AH-goh |
| the sh in shoe | sh | Saoirse: SUR-shuh |
| the s in measure | zh | Zsa: ZHAH |
| hard g as in go | g | Guadalupe: gwah-duh-LOO-pay |
Two spellings to avoid. Do not use a single a on its own to mean “ah”, because an English reader will say the vowel in cat. Do not use i on its own to mean “ee”, because an English reader will say the vowel in sit. Those two substitutions cause more misreadings than anything else.
Worked examples
These are examples, not rulings. Any of these names can be said differently by the person who owns it, and that version is the correct one.
| Name | Phonetic spelling for a card |
|---|---|
| Sophia Lamagna | soh-FEE-uh lah-MAHN-yuh |
| Joaquin Herrera | wah-KEEN eh-REH-rah |
| Siobhan Murphy | shih-VAWN MUR-fee |
| Niamh O’Connor | NEEV oh-KON-ur |
| Saoirse Byrne | SUR-shuh BURN |
| Katarzyna Nowak | kat-uh-ZHIN-uh NOH-vahk |
| Wojciech Kowalski | VOY-chek koh-VAL-skee |
| Priyanka Iyer | prih-YAHNG-kuh EYE-yur |
| Ananya Reddy | uh-NAHN-yuh REH-dee |
| Mateo Guadalupe | mah-TAY-oh gwah-duh-LOO-pay |
| Chidinma Okafor | chih-DEEN-mah oh-KAH-for |
| Nguyen Thi Mai | WIN tee MY |
| Xiomara Cruz | syoh-MAH-rah KROOZ |
| Aoife Gallagher | EE-fuh GAL-uh-hur |
| Thiago Silva | tee-AH-goh SIL-vuh |
Nguyen deserves a note. It is one of the most common surnames in the world and it has several accepted English pronunciations, including WIN, NWIN and NOO-yen, alongside the Vietnamese original that English does not map neatly onto. If it is your name, write the version you use. If it is not, do not assume.
Handling the parts of a full name
First name. Give it the full treatment if it is ever mispronounced. This is the part the room is listening for.
Middle names. Check whether your ceremony reads them at all. Many do not. If yours does and the middle name is unfamiliar, treat it like the first name. If it is a common English name, leave it as it is.
Surnames. These are mispronounced more often than first names, because readers hesitate and then guess. A surname with an unusual letter pattern almost always needs the phonetic version even if it looks short.
Names in two parts. If you have two surnames, as in many Spanish and Portuguese naming traditions, write both and mark the stress in each: Diaz Jaramillo as DEE-ahs ha-ruh-MEE-yoh. Do not merge them.
Suffixes and titles. Leave Jr, III and similar as they are, and write out how you want them said if you have a preference, for example “the third”.
What not to submit
Do not write the name in IPA. /ʃɪˈvɔːn/ is accurate and useless at a podium.
Do not write a description. “Rhymes with Deborah” works in conversation and fails on a card, because the reader has to solve a puzzle mid-sentence. Some universities do accept a rhyming word as an alternative, so check yours, but a syllable breakdown is safer.
Do not respell the parts that are already obvious. If your name is Sarah Chen, writing SEH-ruh CHEN adds nothing and makes the reader work harder. Several universities explicitly ask you to type the easy parts normally.
Do not use accents, apostrophes or non-English letters. Write the sound instead.
Do not leave it blank because your name “looks easy”. Craig, Sean, Louise, Stephen, Ng and Tran all look easy and all get said wrong.
Do not exceed the field length. If the form limits characters, prioritise the surname and the stress marks.
When your name has more than one correct pronunciation
Plenty of names are said two or three different ways by different families, and none of the versions is a mistake. Andrea is AN-dree-uh in most of the English-speaking world and an-DRAY-uh in Italian. Sonia is SOH-nee-uh and son-YAH. Xavier is ZAY-vee-ur, EX-zay-vee-ur and hah-vee-AIR depending on where the family is from.
There is no dictionary answer to this, and a tool cannot supply one either. The person whose name it is decides, and the form is asking for your version specifically. Write the one you answer to, not the one you think is most standard, and not the one a relative in another country uses.
The same applies if you have changed how you say your name since moving, or if you use one version at home and another at work. Put the one you want to hear at the ceremony.
If the form splits the name into fields
Some systems give you one box for the whole name and some give you separate boxes for first, middle and last. The format does not change, but two things are worth checking.
Confirm which fields are actually read aloud. If the form collects a middle name but the ceremony reads only first and last, spending effort on the middle one is wasted.
Watch how the boxes are joined. If the system prints the phonetic fields on separate lines, a reader may pause between them. If you have a preference for how the full name flows, and the form has a notes field, say so there in one short sentence.
Where a form offers a free-text pronunciation box rather than per-field boxes, use the mixed approach that several universities recommend: ordinary spelling for the parts that are never mispronounced, phonetic spelling only where it is needed.
Names with sounds English does not have
Many names contain sounds English simply does not use: the rolled r of Spanish, the guttural sounds of Arabic and Hebrew, the tones of Vietnamese and Mandarin, the retroflex consonants of South Asian languages, the Irish bh and mh.
An announcer cannot produce a sound they have never made, and asking them to try in front of a crowd usually produces something worse than a clean approximation. Pick the nearest English sound and write that. A confident near version sounds respectful. A hesitant attempt at an exact version sounds like an accident.
Where the original matters to you, there is a better place for it than a card read aloud at speed. Tell the people who will be with you, record it for your own profile, or use the ceremony’s audio option if one exists.
Test it before you submit it
Write your version, then hand it to someone who has never heard your name and ask them to read it cold, once, without explanation. That is exactly the situation the announcer will be in.
If they get it right, you are finished. If they hesitate, look at where. A wrong vowel usually means the sound spelling needs changing. A flat, evenly stressed reading means the capitals are missing or in the wrong place. A pause usually means a syllable break is missing.
Do the test with two different people if the name matters to you, ideally one who does not share your first language. A reader who knows your language will silently correct spellings that a reader who does not would misread.
Type your name into the Studio to see it split into syllables and to hear a spoken version. The tool is a starting point rather than an authority on personal names: it reads spelling, and no tool can know how a particular family says a particular name. Use it to draft, then verify with your own ear.
Audio submission, where it exists
An increasing number of institutions accept a recording instead of, or alongside, the written version. Some use a name pronunciation service, some ask for a short clip through the RSVP form, and some have a reader who meets students in the line-up before the ceremony.
Where a recording is offered, take it. It removes every step where written phonetics can be misread. Record in a quiet room, say the full name at normal speed, then say it a second time slightly slower, and stop. Ten seconds is plenty.
Where it is not offered, the written version is what you have, so it is worth the ten minutes this guide asks for.
A checklist before you submit
Run through these six points and the submission is done.
- Every syllable is separated by a hyphen.
- Exactly one syllable in each name part is in capitals.
- No accents, apostrophes or non-English letters appear anywhere.
- No single a is used to mean “ah”, and no single i is used to mean “ee”.
- A stranger read it cold and got it right.
- Parts of the name that are never mispronounced are left in ordinary spelling.
If all six are true, the card will be read correctly. If you are unsure about one of them, the safest fix is almost always to add a hyphen or move the capitals, since those two things carry most of the information.
After graduation
The same respelling is useful well beyond the ceremony. A pronunciation line in an email signature, on a conference badge, or in a speaker introduction saves the same awkward moment in a professional setting, and the format is almost identical. The professional name pronunciation guide covers where to put it on a resume, a LinkedIn profile and a bio.
If you want to understand why the capitals matter so much, the word stress guide explains what a stressed syllable does to a word and why listeners depend on it more than on individual sounds.