1. Of or relating to spoken language or speech sounds; such as, phonetic developments in English since Chaucer’s time; and phonetic differences between ancient and modern Greek.
2. Of or relating to the science of phonetics. 4. Constituting an alteration of the ordinary orthographic spelling that better represents its value in the spoken language, which employs only characters of the regular alphabet, and that is used in a context of conventionally spelled orthographies; for example, thru and nite are fairly common phonetic spellings.
5. Constituting those characters in some ancient writings (as Egyptian) that represent speech sounds as distinguished from such as are ideographic or pictorial
6. Representing speech sounds by means of symbols that have one value only as in this phonetic system, g always has the value of g in go, never of gin and gem.
7. Employing for speech sounds more than the minimum number of symbols necessary to represent the significant differences in a speaker’s speech; contrasted with phonemic.

A set of symbols, each representing a distinct speech sound.

An index of words grouped by sound instead of by spelling.