Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics.

[1] He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.

He learned HTML during the mid-1990s, and he created a Web page that compiled media references to Estuary English, although he was sceptical of the concept.

In addition, Wells is acknowledged as the source of the term rhotic to describe accents where the letter r in spelling is always pronounced phonetically.

[8] He argued that the methodology was outdated, that the sample was not representative of the population and that it was not possible to "discover with any certainty the synchronic vowel-system in each of the localities investigated".

[9] Wells was part of the committee of the Atlas Linguarum Europae for England and Wales, but never played a large role.

His book also included transcriptions of foreign words in their native languages and local pronunciations of place names in the English-speaking world.

He attended St John's School, Leatherhead,[citation needed] studied languages and taught himself Gregg shorthand.

[2] He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be gay at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his sexual orientation public.