Sight words
Sight words and heart words
The Dolch lists, with every word checked: which ones a student can sound out, from which lesson, and which letters need to be learned by heart.
Short answer
Sight words are words a student reads instantly, without sounding out. The Dolch lists hold 220 common ones. Most are not irregular: in our lesson sequence, 198 of the 220 become decodable by sound. Heart words are the ones taught before their pattern, with the irregular letters learned by heart.
The Dolch lists at a glance
| List | Words | Decodable by sound eventually | Keep an irregular part |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dolch pre-primer | 40 | 35 | 5 |
| Dolch primer | 52 | 47 | 5 |
| Dolch first grade | 41 | 36 | 5 |
| Dolch second grade | 46 | 40 | 6 |
| Dolch third grade | 41 | 40 | 1 |
The 95 Dolch nouns are not listed on this site, because many of them double as words in our reading checks. By our engine, 90 of the 95 nouns are decodable once their pattern is taught.
Sight word lists
Dolch pre-primer sight words
The Dolch pre-primer list has 40 of the most common words in early books, such as the, and, said, you and look.Dolch primer sight words
The Dolch primer list has 52 words, the second list after pre-primer: words such as all, are, but, have, they, was and what.Dolch first grade sight words
The Dolch first grade list has 41 words, including after, could, every, from, of, once, were and when.Dolch second grade sight words
The Dolch second grade list has 46 words, such as always, because, been, does, their, very and would.Dolch third grade sight words
The Dolch third grade list has 41 words, such as about, bring, carry, eight, laugh, myself and together.Kindergarten sight words, in the order to teach them
Most kindergarten sight word lists are the Dolch pre-primer and primer lists together: 92 words.
What is the difference between sight words and heart words?
Teachers use "sight words" for two different things, and the mix-up causes most of the confusion. One meaning is any word a student recognizes in a flash. Every skilled reader has thousands of those, and they got there by sounding words out correctly a few times until the spelling stuck. The other meaning is a list of common words, like Dolch, that schools ask young students to learn early.
A heart word is narrower. It's a common word taught before the student can decode it, either because its pattern hasn't been taught yet (go, before open syllables) or because part of it never follows a pattern (the ai in said). You teach a heart word by connecting every sound to its letters and marking the odd part with a heart. The regular letters still get sounded out.
That's why each word on these pages carries two facts from our decodability engine: the lesson from which it can be read by sound, and the lesson where it's taught as a heart word, if it is one. Where a word has letters that never match a taught pattern, those letters are shown in the table.
How this list was built
Every word comes from the public-domain Dolch lists (Dolch, 1936 and 1948). We do not use the Fry list. Each word was run through our decodability engine, which checks the word's spelling units against a pronouncing dictionary and against the lesson in which each spelling and sound is taught.
"Readable by sound from" is the earliest lesson at which every part of the word has been taught. "Heart word at" is the lesson where the sequence teaches it as a heart word. Irregular letters are the ones whose spelling and sound the sequence never teaches. Contractions and words missing from our lexicon are marked to check by hand.