Five written vowels, roughly twenty spoken ones: why spelling misleads
a: cat - car - cake - about
How to use this sheet
English uses five vowel letters, and a sixth that behaves like one when it is not doing consonant work. Spoken English uses somewhere between sixteen and twenty vowel sounds, depending on the accent. The letters were fixed by printers several centuries ago, the sounds went on changing afterwards, and thousands of words arrived from other languages with their original spellings intact. The result is that one written vowel stands for several different spoken vowels, and nothing in the letter tells you which one is meant. That is why the spelling system feels arbitrary to a beginner: it is not a code for the sounds, but a record of where each word came from.
| Letter | Some sounds it spells | Example words |
|---|---|---|
| a | /æ/, /ɑː/, /eɪ/, /ə/ | cat, car, cake, about |
| e | /e/, /iː/, /ə/, silent | bed, he, garden, hope |
| i | /ɪ/, /aɪ/, /ɜː/ | sit, time, bird |
| o | /ɒ/, /əʊ/, /uː/, /ʌ/ | hot, go, do, son |
| u | /ʌ/, /ʊ/, /juː/, /ə/ | cup, put, music, support |
| y | /ɪ/, /aɪ/, /i/ | gym, my, happy |
| ea | /iː/, /e/, /eɪ/, /ɪə/ | sea, bread, great, near |
| oo | /uː/, /ʊ/, /ʌ/ | food, book, blood |
| ou | /aʊ/, /uː/, /ʌ/, /ʊ/ | house, group, country, could |
| ow | /aʊ/, /əʊ/ | now, snow |
| ai | /eɪ/, /e/, /ə/ | rain, said, mountain |
| ie | /iː/, /aɪ/, /e/ | field, tie, friend |
In use
The cat sat in the car. I put the cup down. There is a book about food on the shelf.
Watch out
My frend sed the bred was fresh.
The incorrect line above is what a learner writes when they spell by ear. Three of its words have been given the letters that seem to match their sounds, and all three are wrong, because each of those sounds is normally written with a letter pair that stands for something else elsewhere in the table, as rows seven, eleven and twelve show. The mismatch runs in both directions: one letter can stand for several sounds when you read, and one sound can be written several ways when you write, so neither job can be done by ear alone. The assumption is tempting because most learners come from a language that is spelled consistently, and expecting the same here fails on the commonest words of all.