Spellings of the English Language

An introduction to graphemes

The English language has over forty sounds but only twenty-six letters. Because there are fewer letters than sounds, many sounds, such as the /ch/ in chip, are represented by a letter pair or letter group. Learning to read English would be difficult enough if this were the only quirk of the English writing system. But unfortunately, as anyone reading this article knows, many sounds are represented in more than one way, and many letters or letter groups represent more than one sound. 

The smallest unit of sound that conveys meaning is called a phoneme. Symbols that represent phonemes are called graphemes. In written English, a grapheme may consist of a single letter; a letter pair, called a digraph; or a letter group, called a multigraph. 

Graphemes for consonants often consist of a single letter, which may be doubled up, particularly at the end of word or in the middle of a two-syllable word (Table 1). Most of these consonants have alternate spellings involving two or more different letters, which are also shown in Table 1. 

Several consonants, including ch, ng, sh, voiced and unvoiced th, and qu, are typically represented by digraphs (Table 2). However, sh is also represented by the letter s in sugar, and ch is represented by  the multigraph tch at the end of many words, such as catch.

Spelling of English vowels is quite complex, and many vowels may be represented in several ways (Table 3). Some spellings, such as the spelling of the ew sound in two, are rare or unique.

For both consonants and vowels, certain graphemes can represent different phonemes. Tables 4 shows graphemes that can represent more than consonant, and Table 5 shows graphemes that can represent more than one vowel.

Andrea Hazard is author of the science-based Step-by-Step Reading Program.