Phonics Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| CVC | A consonant-vowel-consonant word, such as cat , pin or top . You may also come across the abbreviation CCVC for consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant words such as clap and from . Also CVCC for words such as mask and belt . |
| Phoneme | Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech-sounds which make up a word. If you change a phoneme in a word, you would change its meaning. For example, there are three phonemes in the word sit /s/-/i/-/t/. If you change the phoneme /s/ for /f/, you have a new word, fit . If you change the phoneme /t/ in fit for a /sh/, you have a new word, fish - /f/-/i/-/sh/. |
| Grapheme | Graphemes are the written representation of sounds. |
| Digraph | A combination of two letters representing one sound, as in ph and ey. |
| Trigraph | A trigraph is a single sound that is represented by three letters, for example: In the word 'match', the three letters 'tch' at the end make only one sound. Other examples of trigraphs are: igh as in sigh. |