Please note that these spellings should not all be taught as graphemes. Many represent a single sound in today’s Australian English because of the way polysyllable words are built from meaningful parts (morphemes). Weird spellings are often best explained by word origin (etymology), e.g. young children can be told a weird spelling reflects how the word was probably pronounced in the Olden Days.
If the spelling you’re interested in doesn’t appear here, you might be thinking of a spelling that actually represents two or more sounds, not just one. Or it might be very obscure, in which case please tell me about it, and I will add it to these lists.
© Alison Clarke 2012
21 responses to “Sorted by spelling”
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What about ngue? Are there any other words beside tongue that you know of?
The only two I know of are meringue and harangue
Thanks for these vey helpful lists!
Are patterns like ‘iou’ as in ‘spacious’ and ‘religious’ not listed because the ‘i’ is considered to be part of the previous consonant rather than part of a vowel spelling pattern?
You’re welcome! Yes, to my way of thinking, ci is quite a common spelling of the phoneme /sh/ in words with Latin suffixes, see http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/sh/ci-as-in-facial), and gi is a less common spelling of /j/, see http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/j/gi-as-in-region. These spellings often function to preserve the spelling of the base word as a recognisable morpheme e.g. music-musician, deficit-deficient, sacrilege-sacrilegious, litigate-litigious. Hope that makes sense and thanks for your feedback. Alison
Thanks for the explanation! I’ve often been unsure of how to cover those common consonant + vowel combinations, but that’s a good point. Would you also break up the -tion suffix similarly (teaching it as ‘ti’ + ‘o’ + ‘n’)?
One similar case: I was looking at words in which ‘d’ is pronounced /dʒ/ and it seems like almost all of them have the sequence ‘di’ and ‘du.’ I wonder if all the ‘d’>/dʒ/ were previously /di/ or /dj/ and then changed to /dʒ/.
A couple other ideas for the list:
– ‘mn’ as in ‘mnemonic’ for the /n/ sound
– ‘th’ as in ‘posthumous’ for the /tʃ/ sound
– ‘z’ as in ‘rendezvous’ or ‘chez’ for the silent z
I have ‘mn’ listed as a spelling of /n/ under my sorted-by-sound menu: http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/n/, but as it’s the only word I know with this spelling, I didn’t set up a page for it, which is why it wasn’t on the sorted-by-sound menu, which I set up later to link to the sub-pages of the sorted-by-sound menu. I’ve added it now, thanks for pointing this out.
Re: ‘posthumous’, the morphological structure is prefix ‘post’ plus ‘hum’ from Latin ‘humare’ meaning to bury, plus adjectival suffix ‘ous’, so it never occurred to me to think of the th as a digraph, very interesting. I think of the letter h as unpronounced, like in “hour”, “honour”, “exhume”, and heaps of other words, see http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/no-sound/h-as-in-hour. I think of the next letter as u as in ‘unit’ reduced to a schwa (/jə/). I’m not sure there’s any spelling benefit to be had by slicing it as you suggest, but the /tʃ/ pronunciation is listed in my Oxford Aust English dictionary as an alternate, so I guess you could do that if you wanted to, and create a new phoneme-grapheme correspondence that is used in only one word. I’ve done my best to avoid this whenever I can, so if there are alternate pronunciations that fit my existing categories, I’ve gone with them. But I guess over time the /tjə/ pronunciation might fall out of use and I’ll have to rethink this.
I have a menu under Sorted By Sound for mostly French-origin words with letters that aren’t pronounced like ballet, rendezvous, chablis, Grand Prix, etc, see http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/no-sound
So interesting to have feedback like this to give me a reason to check and fine-tune my lists, thanks so much for taking the time to send it. Alison
Thanks for the response! I’d somehow never thought about where the word ‘posthumous’ came from, but that strange /tʃ/ makes a lot more sense to me now, I guess like, dropped medial /h/ and then /j/ assimilating to /ʃ/ to form /tʃ/. That grapheme>phoneme match looked strange to me, so I’m glad to see where it could’ve come from finally!
This also makes me think about my general approach… I think my instinct is to just look at how the graphemes and phonemes could possibly be interpreted as lining up by a learner, ignoring structure, root words, etymology, etc. So, even though that ‘t’ and ‘h’ come from different parts of the word, a learner might see it and interpret it as the familiar ‘th’ digraph, and so I want to point it out as an exception to the usual ‘th’ sounds. Or another example, my instinct is to teach that while it’s more common to spell /i/ as ‘ee,’ it’s also possible to spell it ‘ee…e’ as in ‘cheese,’ even though that last ‘e’ is probably more accurately interpreted as part of the common word-final ‘se’ than as part of the vowel.
But learning more about how literacy is taught, including here on your website, I’m thinking I can balance my approach more, and include more information about word roots, affixes, etc.. Sorry, a bit rambling, just interesting to think this all over!
Hi Alison,
This is such a great list, thank you so much!! If there are 44 phonemes in English, how many graphemes would you say there are in English?
Some references I have found say 250, but I feel like your list is even more comprehensive than that! 🙂
Thank you!
I’ve never actually done a count, it depends what you count and teach as a grapheme, and don’t forget that most graphemes relate to more than one phoneme (e.g. the ou in out, soup, cough, rough, soul). Not all graphemes need to be taught, as once kids know the main patterns and are using good strategies (saying the sounds as they write their spellings, especially, and saying words with funny spellings the way they are spelt), the outliers stand out and are easy to remember. If you count things that only occur in one common word, like the ‘au’ in ‘gauge’, the ‘oo’ in ‘brooch’ and the ‘aigh’ in ‘straight, there are probably over 300. But only about 200 occur in words that are important to beginners, and if your phonics curriculum covers 160 or 170 of those it’s doing really well. Words like ‘any’ and ‘many’ probably should just be taught as outliers rather than telling kids the letter A represents the sound /e/, as they’re almost the only words that matter like this. It’s when we DON’T tell kids which are the weird spellings, and they try to generalise from them, that they can run into lots of trouble. Hope that makes sense. Alison
How about aar as in aardvark or aardwolf?
Good thinking, I’ve added it (and of course last year’s software upgrade meant all the formatting went out of whack and it was a world of pain to fix it, but that’s not your fault, that’s just blogging life!) Alison
Thanks for adding! Sorry to have caused any fuss! I think your website and your work is just fab and the best for teaching spelling! Keep up the good work!
What about the /e/ sound in the ee grapheme?
There were some typos and poor punctuation in there – sorry. Let’s try that again…
Does a double r exist as a pattern that negates the common sound of ar, er, it, or, and ur?
eg
car arrow
sir mirror
her error
burn burrow
Yes, doubled consonants usually show us that the preceding vowel is pronounced ‘checked’ or ‘short’ (a as in tapping, e as in bellow, i as in dinner, o as in hopping, u as in cutter) and this applies to double ‘r’ as well, as in ‘carrot’, ‘merry’, ‘chirrup’, ‘sorrow’, ‘hurry’. However there are a few /er/ sound words that don’t follow this pattern e.g. ‘furry’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘hurry’, and ‘erring’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘herring’. Sigh. English.
Hi there,
I am still unsure if blends like spr are considered one grapheme or more. For example, does the word sprung have 3 graphemes?
A blend like ‘spr’ contains 3 phonemes, each of which is represented by a grapheme, in this case a single letter. The word ‘sprung’ has 5 graphemes because the last one is the digraph /ng/. A grapheme is the letter or group of letters used to represent a single phoneme. Hope that makes sense. Alison
Thank you!
Thanks for these amazing lists! It’s such a great work and it’s so helpful for learning English!
I recently was thinking about ‘ch’ combination and came across the word ‘yacht’. Thought it might be worth mentioning in this list. 🙂
Hi Irene, I haven’t tried to include the strangest spellings on this list because usually there is only one word, and that’s the case with ‘yacht’, so I have got it in my system, see https://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/t/cht-as-in-yacht, but if I put all the weird spellings on the ‘sorted by spelling’ table it would be twice as long as it is, and not very helpful in terms of learning patterns as there is no pattern to such words. They’re just odd and once you know the patterns you can see they are exceptions and say them a funny way or make up a little mnemonic or something to help yourself remember the spelling. My main concern is helping kids see and understand the patterns and not think our writing system is a big mess. Hope that makes sense, Alison