Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary - phonetic

 adjective  Etymology: New Latin ~us, from Greek phonetikos, from phonein to sound with the voice, from phone voice  Date: 1819  1.  a. of or relating to spoken language or speech sounds  b. of or relating to the science of ~s  2. representing the sounds and other phenomena of speech: as  a. constituting an alteration of ordinary spelling that better represents the spoken language, that employs only characters of the regular alphabet, and that is used in a context of conventional spelling  b. representing speech sounds by means of symbols that have one value only  c. employing for speech sounds more than the minimum number of symbols necessary to represent the significant differences in a speaker's speech  • ~ally adverb