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Ough is a four-letter sequence, a tetragraph, used in English orthography and notorious for its unpredictable pronunciation. [1] It has at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English , and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them.
In the dominant dialects of modern English, gh is almost always either silent or pronounced /f/ (see Ough). It is thought that before disappearing, the sound became partially or completely voiced to [ɣx] or [ɣ], which would explain the new spelling — Old English used a simple h — and the diphthongization of any preceding vowel.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 January 2025. This is a list of onomatopoeias, i.e. words that imitate, resemble, or suggest the source of the sound that they describe. For more information, see the linked articles. Human vocal sounds Achoo, Atishoo, the sound of a sneeze Ahem, a sound made to clear the throat or to draw attention ...
In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch. English does not have tetragraphs in native words (the closest is perhaps the sequence -ough in words like through), but chth and phth are true tetragraphs when found initially in words of Greek origin such as chthonic and phthisis.
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
Likewise, many graphemes in English have multiple pronunciations and decodings, such as ough in words like thr ough, th ough, th ough t, thor ough, t ough, tr ough, and pl ough. There are 13 ways of spelling the schwa (the most common of all phonemes in English), 12 ways to spell /ei/ and 11 ways to spell /ɛ/. These kinds of incoherences can ...
Another type of spelling characteristic is related to word origin. For example, when representing a vowel, y represents the sound /ɪ/ in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter i .
In Middle Scots, it represented the sound /j/ in the clusters /lj/, /ŋj/ and /nj/ written l ȝ and n ȝ. [4] Yogh was generally used for /j/ rather than y . In medieval Cornish manuscripts, yogh was used to represent the voiced dental fricative [ð] , as in its ȝoȝo , now written dhodho , pronounced [ðoðo] .