What Are Letter Sounds?
The sounds each letter makes — the first step on the road to reading.
Every Letter Has a Sound
The English alphabet has 26 letters, and each one makes at least one sound. Learning these sounds — called phonics — is how children learn to read. The letter B says /b/ as in "ball." The letter M says /m/ as in "moon." When you know what sound each letter makes, you can string those sounds together to read words: C-A-T makes "cat." This is called decoding, and it's the foundational skill of reading.
Consonants and Vowels
The 26 letters split into two groups. Consonants (B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y, Z) mostly make one predictable sound each. Vowels (A, E, I, O, U) are trickier — each vowel makes at least two sounds: a short sound (the "a" in "cat") and a long sound (the "a" in "cake," which says its own name). Y sometimes acts as a vowel too, like in "gym" or "happy."
Blending Sounds Together
Once you know individual letter sounds, the next step is blending — pushing sounds together smoothly to form words. Instead of saying "sss...uuu...nnn" as three separate sounds, you blend them into "sun." Practice makes this automatic. The more you blend, the faster you get, and eventually you recognize common words instantly without sounding them out at all.
Tricky Sounds
Some letters change their sound depending on context. C says /k/ before A, O, U (cat, cold, cup) but /s/ before E, I, Y (cent, city, cycle). G says /g/ before A, O, U (game, go, gum) but sometimes /j/ before E, I (gem, giant). And some letter pairs make entirely new sounds: SH says /sh/, CH says /ch/, TH says /th/. These are called digraphs — two letters, one sound.
The most common letter in English is E — it appears in about 13% of all words. The least common is Z, showing up in less than 0.1% of words. That's why in Scrabble, the tile E is worth only 1 point while Z is worth 10. The letter frequencies were first carefully analyzed by Samuel Morse when he created Morse code in the 1830s — he made the most common letters the shortest codes (E is just a single dot).
Last reviewed: April 2026