The (polyphone-like) English SpeechDat(M) database contains the recordings of 1,000 speakers who were recorded over the fixed telephone network. It is divided into two sub-sets: the phonetically rich sentences (one CD) known as DB2, and the application-oriented utterances (two CDs) known as DB1. It was validated by SPEX (the Netherlands) to assess its compliance with the SpeechDat format and content specifications. Each speaker uttered the following items: number and letter sequences, common control keywords, dates, times, money amounts, etc. This provides a realistic basis for using these resources for the training and assessment of speaker-independent recognition of both isolated and continuous speech utterances, employing either whole-word modeling and/or phoneme based approaches. A pronunciation lexicon with a phonemic transcription in SAMPA is also included.