name ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Proper Noun

1. 1
   An alphabet based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but using only 7-bit ASCII characters, to work around text encoding problems before the introduction of Unicode.
2. 2
   Nickname for São Paulo: a municipality, the state capital of São Paulo State, Brazil

   "This is Sampa my friend; anything can happen."

Example

More examples

"This is Sampa my friend; anything can happen."

Etymology

Etymology 1

Acronym of Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet.

Etymology 2

Borrowed from Brazilian Portuguese Sampa.

Related phrases

X-SAMPAinternational phonetic alphabet

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.