short a

Could you go to http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/audio-medlineplus.pl?back0001=back
and then tell me what vowel from this page best matches the vowel in that word
http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm ?

I couldn't find a perfect match; it's somewhere between the "ae" sound and the one above it that looks like a lowercase epsilon. (Sorry, I don't know the keystrokes for phonetic characters!) I guess the way I say "back"--which is the way it's said on the merriam-webster site--isn't recognized by the IPA. :-)

yeah, its a bit higher than [æ], towards [ɛ]