Phonics

Phonics word lists by spelling and sound

In short

Phonics is how the sounds of speech map to the letters that spell them. These 129 lists sort 19,211 checked words by spelling and by the sound that spelling makes, so ch in chin and ch in school never share a list.

Most word lists online group words by how they look. That's how chef ends up on a ch list next to chin, and why a student practicing /ch/ gets tripped up. Each list here is built from a lexicon where every word is split into its spelling units and checked against a pronouncing dictionary. When one spelling has more than one sound, each sound gets its own page, with the counts side by side.

Every table shows the word, its spelling units, its syllable count and the first lesson where a student can sound it out. Use the readable column to pick words a student can read today, and the position tables for digraphs and blends when you need a sound at the start, middle or end. Each page also has teaching notes, the usual student error with a fix, and a few decodable sentences.

Short vowels and CVC words

The first words a student sounds out: one short vowel, closed in by consonants.

Digraphs, trigraphs and silent letters

Two or three letters for one sound, and the letters that make no sound at all.

Consonant blends

Two or three consonants side by side, each still saying its own sound.

Silent e

The final e that makes the vowel before it say its name.

Long vowels and y as a vowel

Every common spelling of each long vowel sound, side by side.

Vowel teams

Two or more letters that spell one vowel sound, split by the sound they actually make.

Diphthongs and schwa

Gliding vowel sounds, and the lazy vowel in unstressed syllables.

R-controlled vowels

Vowels changed by the r that follows them.

Endings, soft letters and syllable patterns

Welded sounds, suffix sounds and spellings that show up at the ends of longer words.

How these lists were built

The lists come from our lexicon of common English words, each aligned letter by letter to a pronouncing dictionary. Words a student sees in our assessments are left out, so practice never rehearses a test. The readable after lesson comes from our decodability engine, which checks every spelling unit and syllable pattern against the lesson sequence. Patterns with fewer than 15 words, or whose words overlap another list too much, don't get a page.