BellyI heard them being pronounced differently, a bare /e/ for AmE
Hi,
it's not /e/ in American English. It's around /æ/. Then there are diffrences, because for example, a lot of poeple change it before N, M, or NG, so "pan" is usually either /peən/ or /pɛən/.
As for British English, I don't know, but there are a lot of different accents.
Dictionaries only give you a transcription so that you know what kind of syllable you have to use when pronouncing a word, but they never tell you the exact sounds for every dialect.