Phonics Glossary 

This glossary explains common Phonics terms you may hear your child or their teacher use. The meanings are written in a clear and simple way to help you support your child’s reading and spelling at home.

Phonics

Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and spell by learning the sounds that letters make and how those sounds are put together to form words. Example: The word cat can be read by sounding out /c/ /a/ /t/ and blending the sounds together.

Phoneme

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. English has about 44 different sounds, even though we only use 26 letters.
Example: The word cat has three phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/

Grapheme

A grapheme is how we write a sound. It can be one letter or a group of letters.
Example: The sound /f/ can be written as f (fish) or ph (phone)

Blending

Blending is putting sounds together to read a word.
Example: Saying /s/ /u/ /n/ and blending them to read sun

Segmenting

Segmenting is breaking a word into its sounds to help with spelling.
Example: Breaking dog into /d/ /o/ /g/ to spell it

Decodable Words

Decodable words are words children can sound out using the Phonics they have already learned.
Examples: cat, ship, moon

Tricky Words

Tricky words are words that do not follow normal Phonics rules and need to be remembered by sight.
Examples: the, was, said, could

Initial Sound

The initial sound is the first sound in a word.
Example: The initial sound in sun is /s/

Digraph

A digraph is two letters that make one sound.
Examples:

  • sh in ship, ch in chat, th in thin

Trigraph

A trigraph is three letters that make one sound.
Examples:

  • igh in night, ear in hear

Split Digraph

A split digraph is when a vowel and the letter e work together to make one sound, even though they are separated by a consonant.
Examples:

  • a_e in cake, i_e in time, o_e in home

Pure Sounds

Pure sounds are said clearly without adding extra sounds at the end.
Example: The sound /m/ should be said as “mmm”, not “muh”

Letter Names

Letter names are what we call letters in the alphabet (A, B, C), not the sounds they make when reading words.
Example: The letter S is called “ess” but makes the sound /s/

Sound Buttons

Sound buttons are dots and lines written under letters to show how many sounds are in a word. They help children sound out words when reading.

  • Dots = one letter, one sound

  • Lines = two or more letters, one sound
    Example: ship → sh = line, i = dot, p = dot

Real Words

Real words are words that have a meaning in English.
Examples: dog, house, happy

Nonsense Words (Alien Words)

Nonsense words are made-up words used to check that children can sound out words using phonics, not just memory.
Examples: zog, splim, vake

Phonetic

Phonetic means relating to how words sound. When children read phonetically, they sound out each part of a word to read it.

Kinesthetic Learning

Kinesthetic learning means learning by doing and moving. Some children learn best through actions, games and hands-on activities rather than just listening or looking.