A typical entry, given as an example in the preface, was eksplə'neiʃən 'explanation'. In this work, the headwords of the dictionary were listed in phonemic transcription, followed by their spelling form, so the user needed to be aware of the phonemic composition of a word, in order to discover its spelling. The precursor to the English Pronouncing Dictionary was A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language by Hermann Michaelis and Daniel Jones, published in Germany in 1913.

Wells has written of it 'EPD has set the standard against which other dictionaries must inevitably be judged'. The dictionary is now in its 18th edition. It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more pronunciations transcribed using a set of phonemic symbols based on a standard accent. The English Pronouncing Dictionary ( EPD) was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917.