You must have used these common words like though, cough, tough, bough, neigh, weigh, enough, although etc. in your daily life conversation. You might have noticed that each of them ends with –gh– and gives different speech sound in each word. Apparently, the letter ‘g’ and ‘h’ have their separate sounds but when they combine, they produce a new sound. This called digraph i.e. when the sounds associated with two letters merge to give a single new sound. Digraphs generally consist of two consonants that blend to make one sound. Some common digraphs are ph and gh.
Today we’ll be targeting those words in English language that contain digraph -gh- and the sound generated by these letters collectively when we enunciate such words.
Let’s look at the sound produced by digraph gh. This combination of letter g and h doesn’t always act a digraph. Sometimes it may sound like ‘f’ such as in cough, -gh- gives a sound of /f/ while sometimes it may be silent in some words like though, bough etc. There are no specific rules about this pattern. These must be learned simply by remembering them. Some common patterns in which the digraph gh is used are
Gh Words Phonics for Kids
- -ough Words- This is the trickiest combination among all of these. You can pronounce it in 7 different ways with different words. A few words in which this pattern is used are though, although, through, thought, cough, bough, enough etc. These words cover all 7 pronunciations associated with this pattern.
- -eigh- You’ll see this type of pattern in words like eight, height, weight, neighbor. It gives a sound like ‘ay’ in most of the words.
- -igh- The words like high, sigh, thigh, light, right etc. have the -igh- pattern. It sounds like the letter ‘i’ when pronouncing these words.
- -augh- This pattern can be found in words like daughter, slaughter, laughter, taught etc.
Here is a separate list of some ‘gh words’ that sound like ‘f’ in pronunciation.
- rough, roughly
- tough
- cough, coughing
- laugh, laughter, laughing
- enough
- trough
In all these alphabets, gh sounds like /f/. For better understanding the pronunciation of digraphs, you should listen the audio recordings.