Studied implementational choices in pronunciation by analogy (PbA) for English to assess its ultimate suitability - both as a model of the human process of reading aloud, and as a component of a text-to-speech (TTS) system. The variables studied were the specific lexical database used as the basis of the analogy process, the way of ranking/scoring candidate pronunciations, and the effect of manual vs automatic alignment of letters and phonemes. When tested with short (monosyllabic) pseudowords, the lowest error rate achieved was 14.3%. This suggests that the current PbA systems are at best poor models of pseudoword pronunciation by humans. When tested with lexical words temporarily removed from the dictionary, the best performance obtained was 93.5% phonemes correct for a 16,280-word dictionary. This was superior to the 25.7% words correct obtained using a set of popular letter-to-sound rules, indicating considerable scope for analogy methods to be exploited in future TTS systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)