Sounds of english letters

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With this alphabet chart, understand how to say the names of the letters and read about all the sounds of each letter from the alphabet. These are the basic phonetic sounds for American English. To learn important sounds using free videos online, go to Pronunciation in English: 500 Words.

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» Sounds and letters

Learning the building blocks of words - sounds, their spellings, and word parts

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If you want to store a large, complex system such as the English spelling system in a finite human brain, you have to organise it well.

To organise something, you first need an organising principle or principles.

If you want to use the relationship between letters and sounds as your organising principle for spelling (and most sensible people do), you can start from the letters and work to the sounds, or start from the sounds and work to the letters.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but English also has a whole stack of letter combinations that can represent individual sounds:

• Two letter combinations, like “oo” as in “book”, “er” as in “her”, “ph” as in “phone” and “ey” as in “key”
• Three letter combinations, like “igh” as in “high”, “dge” as in “bridge”, “tch” as in “catch” and “ere” as in “here”.
• Four letter combinations, like “eigh” as in “eight”, “aigh” as in “straight”, “augh” as in “caught”, and “ough” as in “bought”, “drought”, “dough”, “through”, “thorough” (but not “cough” or “tough”, where the “ou” and the “gh” represent different sounds, and just happen to be next to each other).

To add to the complexity, many letters and letter combinations can represent more than one sound, for example, the letter “y” represents four different sounds in the words “yes”, “by”, “baby” and “gym”. The spelling “ea” represents three different sounds in the words “beach”, “dead” and “break”.

As well as more common letter-sound patterns, there are letter-sound patterns that only occur in one or two words, like the “sth” in “asthma” and “isthmus”, and the “xe” in “axe”, “deluxe” and “annexe”.

It's an almost impossible task to use letters and letter patterns to organise your thinking about spelling, as there are simply so many of them and their relationships with sounds are so complex.

After a while it starts to seem that there must be thousands of sounds in English, whereas there are only 44[1] . So let's try using sounds as our organising principle.

The sounds of English are:

Three pairs of consonants made by stopping airflow in the mouth then letting it go:

• “p” as in pop, puppy and cantaloupe (voiceless lip sound).
• “b” as in bob, rubber, build and cupboard (voiced lip sound).
• “t” as in tot, butter, backed, joked, laundrette, torte, Thomas, receipt, debt, yacht, indict and pizza (voiceless tongue tip sound).
• “d” as in did, muddy, wagged, aide and jodhpurs (voiced tongue tip sound).
• “k” as in cot, king, luck, quit, chrome, mosque, khaki, liquor, accord, excel, Bourke, trekking, acquaint, racquet and zucchini (voiceless back of the tongue sound).
• “g” as in go, biggest, guide, ghoul and morgue (voiced back of the tongue sound).

Three pairs of consonants made through your nose using your voice:

• “m” as in mum, hammer, limb, autumn, programme and paradigm (lip sound).
• “n” as in non, runner, know, reign, cayenne, pneumonia and mnemonic (tongue tip sound).
• “ng” as in wing, think and tongue (back of the tongue sound).

Four pairs of friction sounds made by squeezing air through narrow spaces in the mouth:

• “th” as in thin, Matthew and phthalates (voiceless tongue-between-teeth sound).
• “th” as in this and breathe  (voiced tongue-between-teeth sound).
• “f” as in far, sniff, phone, cough, Chekhov, gaffe, carafe and often[2] (voiceless teeth on lip sound).
• “v” as in vat, love, skivvy, of, Stephen and Louvre (voiced teeth on lip sound).
• “s” as in sell, city, voice, house, scent, pass, whistle, psychologist, quartz, coalesce, mousse, sword, asthma, and waltz.
• “z” as in zip, is, pause, dazzling, bronze, xylophone, dessert, business and tsar/czar.
• “sh” as in ash, lotion, passion, pension, facial, chef, schnitzel, moustache, ocean, sugar, appreciate, initiate, conscience, tissue, cushion, crescendo and fuchsia.
• “zh” as in beige, vision, pleasure, aubergine, déjà vu, seizure, equation and casuarina.

One pair of sounds made by stopping the air and then releasing it through a narrow space in the mouth:

• “ch” (a combination of “t” and “sh”) as in chair, hutch, creature, bocconcini, cappuccino, kitsch, luncheon, question, righteous, ciao and Czech.
• “j” (a combination of “d” and “zh”) as in jar, gem, sponge, ridge, budgie, religion, adjust, suggest, educate, soldier and hajj.

Four semi-vowels:

• “w” as in we, when, quack, one, marijuana and ouija.
• “y” as in yum, onion, hallelujah, tortilla and El Niño.
• “r” as in rip, wrist, barrel, rhubarb, diarrhoea and Warwick.
• “l” as in look, doll, grille, aisle, island and kohl.

One friction sound that has no pair:

• “h”, made by squeezing air through the back of your throat, as in hat, who, jojoba and junta.

So that makes 24 consonant sounds. Then there are 20 vowels:

Six “checked” vowels that require a consonant sound after them in English (sometimes called "short" vowels):

• “a” as in at, plait, salmon, meringue and Fahrenheit.
• “e” as in wet, deaf, any, said, says, friend, haemmorhage, leopard, leisure, bury and Geoff.
• “i” as in in, myth, passage, pretty, breeches, busy, marriage, sieve, women and bream.
• “o” as in on, swan, because, entree, cough, John, lingerie and bureaucracy.
• “u” as in up, front, young, blood, does and laksa.
• “oo” as in pull, good, could, wolf, tour and Worcestershire.

Six other vowels that are sometimes called “long vowels” (they're not really long, but they can be the last sound in a word):

• “ay” as in same, sail, say, danger, weigh, vein, they, café, reggae, great, purée, fete, straight, gauge, gaol, laissez-faire and lingerie.
• “I” as in like, hi, by, pie, high, type, chai, feisty, bye, height, kayak, eye, iron, maestro and naive.
• “oh” as in rope, no, boat, goes, glow, plateau, soul, mauve, though, yolk, brooch, owe, sew and Renault.
• “ooh” as in food, June, chew, brutal, youth, clue, fruit, to, sleuth, shoe, roux, coup, pooh, through, two, manoeuvre and bouillion.
• “you” (a combination of “y” and “ooh”) as in use, few, cue, feud, tulip, beauty, pursuit, ewe and vacuum.
• “ee” as in bee, eat, field, me, these, jelly, taxi, turkey, ceiling, marine, paediatric, amoeba, quay, people, Grand Prix, fjord, ratatouille and Leigh.

Seven other vowels, some of which are called "r-controlled" vowels in some spelling books:

• “ar” as in arm, past, calf, blah, charred, are, baa, clerk, aunt, heart, bazaar and bizarre.
• “er” as in fern, curl, dirt, word, pearl, purr, err, whirred, slurred, masseur, journalist, milieu, were, colonel, myrrh, myrtle and hors d’oeuvre.
• “aw” as in saw, cord, more, court, faun, bought, wart, all, door, chalk, taught, board, dinosaur, baulk, sure, broad, awesome, you’re, corps, extraordinaire, hors d’oeuvre and assurance.
• “ou” as in out, cow, drought, kauri, Maori and miaow.
• “oy” as in boy, soil, Freud, lawyer and Despoja.
• “air” as in care, fair, pear, parent, aerial, solitaire, there, sombrero, heir, their, they’re, prayer, mayor and yeah.
• “ear” as in dear, beer, tier, ere, bacteria, souvenir, Hampshire, weird and Shakespeare.

One unstressed vowel, heard mostly in multisyllable words:

• “uh” as in fire, super, metre, buzzard, tractor, odour, jealous, nature, mynah, violent, pencil, cherub, delicate, granite, purpose, minute, restaurant, aesthetic, martyr, mischievous, borough, portrait, foreign, papier-mache, cupboard, sulphur, porpoise, circuit, tapir…

The unstressed vowel also occurs in spoken sentences in small, grammatical words like "a" and "the". Because these words occur very frequently, this can be a source of much confusion about how basic vowels are spelt.

This is still a long list, but at least it's possible to put a lid on it, by teaching the main spellings for all the sounds in one-syllable words, then the main additional spellings in longer words.

Eventually you find you've got most words covered, and there's just a list of weird ones for each sound that don't follow any major pattern, and are therefore also memorable.

Learners can make up a spelling collection with a page for each sound, and list all the spellings they know in groups. In fact there are books you can buy for this purpose such as Soundasaurus, but I generally quibble with some of the categories, and prefer to use my own Spelling Collection. Crossings-out, sticky notes and/or extra pages added in later are good evidence that learners have been actively thinking and learning about the relationship between sounds and letters.

[1] Linguists will always argue about how many sounds there are in English, because the mouth is a mushy place without clear boundaries – for example, the “l” sound at the start of “look” is phonetically different from the one at the end of “hall”, and the sound “ay” in “play” and “ie” as in “time” are technically two sounds, but slicing things that finely doesn’t really help with learning spelling. Most people say there are between 42 and 44 sounds for the purposes of teaching spelling (depending on whether you call "ear" and "air" separate spellings or not).

[2] and lieutenant if you speak British English, but actually this word comes from French and means someone standing in (in lieu) for the tenant or office-holder, so the American pronunciation (“loo-tenant”, not “leff-tenant”) is closer to the original French.

« Spelling rules

table, transcription and pronunciation, reading

Sounds that represent English letters - 44 English phonemes, which are divided into two categories: consonants and vowels. Since sounds cannot be written down, graphemes (letters or combinations of letters) are used to convey sounds in writing.

English alphabet

There are 26 letters in English. The standard English alphabet starts with a and ends with z.

When classifying alphabetic characters, they distinguish:

• 5 pure vowels: a, e, i, o, u;
• 19 pure consonants: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z;
• 2 semivowels: y, w.

Learning the English alphabet requires knowledge of both the symbol representing each letter and the phonetic sounds associated with that letter. Learning English phonetics is difficult. Only a small number of letters have no exceptions in the main sound.

In most cases each letter has several phonemes. The letter B sometimes sounds like bat (bet) or does not sound, for example, in the words crumb (krum), dumb (dam). The letter C sounds like "k" for cat (ket) or "c" for ceiling (si:ling), or "tch" for church (tche:tch). And the list of exceptions is endless.

Vowels

Vowels represent the main category of phonemes in English speech. There are 20 vowels in spoken English. This discrepancy (in relation to literal characters) underlies the complexity of writing in English.

Additional vowels are used for short and long vowels. For sounds a and e - when the vowel accompanies the sound r. For o, the options are varied.

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Consonants

Alphabetical order

Transcription and stress

Phonetic transcriptions tell about the pronunciation of words. In English dictionaries, this is a necessary condition, since the spelling does not say how the word is pronounced.

Phonetic transcriptions are written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), in which each English sound is assigned its own symbol. For example, the IPA-based phonetic transcription of the word home is /hoʊm/, the transcription of come is /kʌm/, despite the fact that the spelling of the words is similar (both end in –ome), but are transcribed with differences.

The rules do not fully cover aspects of stress in English words. The language is characterized by the presence of exceptions, and the English themselves make mistakes, especially in polysyllabic words.

But obviously some basic rules still apply:

1. In 80% of two-syllable nouns and adjectives, the stress falls on the first syllable: PURple, PREsent, CARton, TABle, CLEver, CHIna.
2. Most verbs and two-syllable prepositions have the stress on the second syllable: reLAX, beCIN, deCIde, betWEen.
3. The English language has many two-syllable words of the same spelling that will refer to nouns or verbs depending on whether the stress falls on the first or second syllable. For example, PREsent as a noun, but if the second syllable of preSENT is emphasized, it becomes a verb, or OBject and obJECT.
4. The stress falls on the syllable before the suffix if the "ending" begins with i or u: -ion, -ual, -uous, -ial, -ient, -ious, -ior, -ic, -ity, etc. . Examples: sufFICient, explaNAtion, residual, geoGRAPhic. The exceptions are -ist, -ism, -ize, and -ing.
5. Other suffixes do not affect word stress: -al, -ous, -ly, -er, -ed, -ist, -ing, -ism, etc. The stress falls on the first syllable. ORderly, Silently
6. Words ending in consonants or y are stressed on the first syllable: RARity, OPtimal.

Prefixes in two-syllable words are not stressed except in certain nouns or adjectives. Two-syllable nouns beginning with a prefix are studied individually.

English consonants

There are fewer consonants in the English alphabet than there are consonants. Therefore, digraphs like "ch", "sh", "th" and "zh" are used to expand the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than just one consonant. For example, the sound written "th" in this is transcribed as /ð/, and "th" in thin is /θ/.

English consonants are classified by their combination of functions:

1. Way of articulation (how air leaves the vocal tract).
2. Place of formation (which authorities are involved).
3. Phonation (how vocal chords vibrate).
4. Voicing start time (time of sounds formation), aspiration is part of the function.
5. Air flow mechanism (how air moves through the vocal tract).
6. Length (how long a consonant is blocked) is a feature of the English language, such as wholly /hoʊlli/ and holy /hoʊli/.
7. Articulation power.

In addition, there is a function "silent alveolar stop" , /t/ when the airflow mechanism is lowered.

According to the method of formation, consonants are divided into:

1. Proximants: j, w, r.
2. Nine fricative consonants: f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ,ʒ,h.
3. Lateral approximant: l.
4. Two affricative sounds: tʃ and dʒ.
5. Six plosives: p,b, t, d, k, g.
6. Nasal consonants: m, n, ŋ.

The sound - [x] - a voiceless fricative - is non-standard for the English language. Although in some original words, such as ugh (ugh!), Is an additional marker of irritation. In writing, the fricative is represented as "gh".

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Features of English consonants

A consonant combination is a set of two or three consonant letters that retain their original sound when pronounced. Such sets occur either at the beginning or at the end of a word. For example, the word brave, in which both "b" and "r" are pronounced, is the initial combination. In the word bank "-nk" is the final combination.

Classification:

1. Initial combinations are classified into sets with "l", "r", and "s". In "l", the combination ends with "l". An example would be the letters "bl" in the word blind. Similarly, the final sound in "r" in combination with "r" when "br" and "cr", for example, in the words bridge, crane. On the contrary, in "s" it starts with s, "st" and "sn" - stap, snail.
2. End combinations are grouped into sets with "s", "l" and "n": -st, -sk, -ld, -nd, -nk. Examples, first, desk, gold, sand, sink.

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Consonant digraphs refer to a set of consonants forming one sound. Some digraphs are both at the beginning and at the end of the word - "sh", "ch" and "th". There are also strict initial and final digraphs - "kn-" and "-ck".

Examples of digraphs:

Features of digraphs:

1. In some cases, consonants become unpronounceable: letter b following m; k before m; b and p before t. Examples of words, dumb, know, debt, receipt. The letter l is often silent, for example, in the words walk, could, palm, psalm, but in words its presence changes the sound of the previous vowel.
2. If a double consonant appears in a word, it is pronounced as one sound - ball or summer
3. In English, /h/ occurs as a one-letter grapheme (either silent or representing a voiceless glottal fricative consonant). There is also a letter in different digraphs, ch, gh, ph, sh, wh. The letter is silent in the words: ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, hour, honest, vehicle, herb (in American English, but pronounced in British). The initial /h/ is expressed in some function words (had, has, have, he, her, him, his).

English Consonant Pronunciation Chart

b bag [bæg], band [bænd], cab [kæb] bag, band, cab d d dad [dæd], did [dɪd], lady [leɪdɪ], odd [ɒd] dead, did, lady, od f f, ph, sometimes gh fable [feɪbl], fact [fækt], if [ɪf], off [ɒf], photo [foutou], glyph [glɪf] fable, fact, if, oof, foutow, glyph g g give [gɪv], flag [flæg] giv, flag h h hold [hould], ham [hæm] held, ham j usually represented by y but sometimes by other vowels yellow [jeləʊ], yes [jes], young [jʌŋ], neuron [njʊərɒn], cube [kju:b] ielou, ies, yang, n(b) yueron, k(b) yu:b - the sound j is similar to the vowel i:. k k, c, q, que, ck, sometimes ch cat [kæt], kill [kil], queen [kwi:n], skin [skɪn], thick [θɪk], chaos [keiɒs] cat, kil, qui:n, sik, keyos l l lane [lein], clip [klɪp], bell [bel], milk [mɪlk], sould [səʊld] lane, clip, bel, milk, sould - has two sound options: pure /l/ before a vowel, “darkened” /ɫ/ before a consonant or at the end of a word m m man [mæn], them [ðem], moon [mu:n] man, zem, mu:n n n nest [nest], sun [sʌn] nest, san ŋ ng ring [rɪŋ], sing [sɪŋ], finger [fɪŋgə]

[ŋ] is sometimes followed by the sound [g]. [ŋ] if "ng" is at the end of a word or a related word (sing, singer, thing), to "-ing", which translates verbs into participles or gerunds. [ŋg], if "ng" is not at the end of a word or in related words, also in comparative degrees (longer [lɔŋgə], longest).