Open almost any phonics book, app, or school newsletter and you'll hit a wall of jargon — phonemes, graphemes, digraphs, decodables. None of it is complicated once it's explained plainly. Here are the 25 terms that come up the most, grouped so they're easy to look up again later.
Sound and letter basics
These eight terms describe the raw material of phonics: sounds and the letters used to write them.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Phoneme | The smallest unit of sound in a word. "Cat" has three phonemes: /k/ /a/ /t/. |
| Grapheme | The letter or letter group that writes down a phoneme, like "ch" for one sound. |
| Letter sound | The sound a letter makes, e.g. "m" says /m/. Taught before letter names in most programs. |
| Letter name | What a letter is called, e.g. "em" for m — separate from its sound. |
| Digraph | Two letters that together make one sound: "sh," "ch," "th," "oo." |
| Trigraph | Three letters making one sound, like "igh" in "night" or "tch" in "catch." |
| Blend | Two or three letters that keep their own sounds but run together quickly, like "bl" in "black." |
| Split digraph (silent e) | A vowel-consonant-e pattern where the e is silent but changes the vowel sound, like "cake" or "bike." |
How phonics is taught
- Synthetic phonics: teaching individual letter sounds first, then blending them together to read whole words — sounding out "c-a-t" and blending it into "cat." This is the dominant approach in UK schools and most modern US programs.
- Analytic phonics: starting from whole words and breaking them down to find shared patterns, like comparing "cat," "hat," and "mat" to notice the "-at" pattern, rather than sounding out letter by letter.
- Systematic phonics: teaching sounds in a planned, cumulative sequence rather than as they happen to come up in a book. Most decodable-based programs are systematic.
- Decodable text: a book written using only the letter sounds a child has already been taught, so every word can be sounded out rather than guessed.
- Tricky word (or heart word): a common word that can't be fully sounded out with the phonics learned so far, like "said" or "the" — partly sounded, partly learned by heart.
- Sight word: any word a child recognizes instantly without sounding out, including tricky words and ordinary decodable words practiced to fluency.
- Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words, entirely oral — no letters involved. Knowing "cat" without its first sound is "at" is phonemic awareness.
- Phonological awareness: the broader skill of hearing sound patterns in language — phonemic awareness plus rhyme, syllables, and word patterns.
Reading and spelling process terms
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Decoding | Turning written letters into spoken sounds to read a word — "sounding out." |
| Encoding | The reverse of decoding: turning spoken sounds into written letters, i.e. spelling. |
| Blending | Pushing individual sounds together smoothly to say a word: /s/ /u/ /n/ → "sun." |
| Segmenting | Breaking a spoken word into its separate sounds: "sun" → /s/ /u/ /n/ — the skill spelling depends on. |
| Orthographic mapping | The mental process that lets a decoded word become instantly recognizable after enough correct practice. |
| Automaticity | Reading known words instantly, without conscious sounding-out. |
| Fluency | Reading accurately, at a natural pace, with expression — what phonics practice is ultimately building toward. |
| Phonics screening check | A short UK Year 1 test that checks whether a child can decode using phonics, using real and made-up words. |
| CVC word | A consonant-vowel-consonant word like "cat," "dog," or "sun" — usually the first word type children read independently. |
Not sure where to start teaching?
Once the vocabulary makes sense, the next question is usually which letter sound to teach first. Our guide to phonics teaching order walks through the sequence most programs use and why it's built that way.
Two terms above trip up parents more than any others — phoneme and grapheme. If that pair still feels blurry, our grapheme vs phoneme explainer breaks it down with concrete examples. And if you're wondering why programs teach sounds before letter names, see letter sounds vs letter names.