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Why the phonetic /ɔ/ is related to the phonetic /ɑ/ and the phonetic /oʊ/ at the same time even though they're totally different in pronunciation?
/ɔ/&/ɑ/ /ɔ/ Awesome, autumn, Australia, Talk, walk /ɑ/ arm, farm, bar, hard, father, art, large, far
/ɔ/&/oʊ/ /ɔ/ All, or, horse, north, order, morning /oʊ/ Note, most, hope, Home, Boat
The first thing that you should note is that the transcriptions (from dictionary.com) are sometimes in error. Example, top in the provided recording does not have the vowel [ɒ], in fact they seem a bit confused over [ɒ]. Interestingly, they offer one recording but two different transcriptions for dog. It is true that there are different pronunciations of dog, as you can hear in the Merriam Webster recordings. I think the engine underlying dictionary.com harvested ipa transcriptions, and there was no intervening linguist to decide if a certain transcription matched a particular recording. The MacMillan dictionary does match transcriptions and recordings, so compare stɔk "stalk" and stɑk "stock" – I "disagree" in that these are homophones in my dialect, but this is a classic example of the [ɔ / ɑ] contrast. They also correctly label the vowel "o" in smog as [ɑ] and the "o" in frog as [ɔ]. The MacMillan data is much more consistent.
Dialect differences.
In many dialects, especially non-rhotic ones, the vowels in NORTH and THOUGHT are the same. In others, NORTH is more similar to GOAT.
This dictionary seems to be based on the first sort of dialect, while I'm guessing you speak the second sort.
