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I found that there are many disparities between different dictionaries especially for American pronunciation.

for example the word "character" pronunciation in Longman is /ˈkærəktər/ and in Cambridge it is /ˈker.ək.tɚ/.

I also checked Youglish and I guess I can hear both sounds in different videos.

This is the case also in words like parallel and parenthesis.

Is it regional variations?

Which one is the standard reference pronunciation?

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    Hi, does this answer your question? How are 'marry', 'merry', and 'Mary' pronounced differently?
    – herisson
    Commented Aug 21 at 9:43
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    …and now that I think of it, no individual speaker always uses any single pronunciation in every circumstance.
    – PaulTanenbaum
    Commented Aug 21 at 10:09
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is posited upon there being a standard pronunciation.
    – Greybeard
    Commented Aug 21 at 10:40
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    @Greybeard In this case there's a very specific reason for the discrepancy between dictionaries, and properly explaining it would be quite valuable!
    – alphabet
    Commented Aug 21 at 19:50
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    @tchrist The first part of the question ("Is it regional variations?") is surely answerable. Voting to reopen.
    – alphabet
    Commented Aug 21 at 19:53

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In North American English, /ær/ is largely merged with /ɛr/ (= /er/ in the dictionaries' notation). According to the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey, 57% of Americans merge all of Mary/merry/marry.

But when it comes to pronunciation, dictionaries aimed at non-native speakers of English try to reduce the amount of information their targeted readership needs to learn. As Michael Ashby, the phonetics editor of the sixth edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, put it:

[The system adopted by the dictionary] has a number of features which are strictly speaking redundant from an American point of view (for instance, it uses length marks). The intention is that the redundant features can be overlooked by a user interested only in American pronunciation, but they serve the important function of permitting a single transcription to do for both accents in many cases. Thus seat is /siːt/ and need not be transcribed /siːt; US sit/.

Any learner of English needs to learn the difference between /æ/ and /e/ (= /ɛ/), as in bad and bed. But no American or Canadian will have trouble understanding you just because you pronounce marry with /æ/. So a learner's dictionary may choose not to teach the fact it's pronounced with /e/ by more than half of North Americans, because that would be to teach "You need to distinguish between /æ/ and /e/, except before /r/", which would be an additional thing for the learners to remember.

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