[citation needed] A standard of pronunciation is the most common way to pronounce a word.
Early dictionaries, such as that by Samuel Johnson in England and later Noah Webster in the United States played a large role in making spelling more uniform.
At first, American dictionaries (at least) tended to avoid listing pronunciations that they considered non-standard, and thus they played a prescriptive role (the British tradition is far more descriptive).
Proper nouns such as names of people and places are written as foreign words and often given their native pronunciation too.
Using computational techniques, such as machine learning, it is possible to automatically detect mispronunciations in recorded speech.