Long O Words

A silent e on the end reaches back over one consonant and makes the o say its name. Hop becomes hope, not becomes note, rob becomes robe. The e itself says nothing.

Phone is the one worth pausing on. Its first sound is spelled with two letters that say /f/, which is a different pattern layered on top of this one. A child who has met ph words will recognise it; a child who has not will need telling once.

Silent-e words has the full lists across all five vowels, and the short-to-long pairs this section’s words come from.

Oa is two letters spelling one sound, and it sits inside a word rather than at the end. Boat, coat, goat. Say boat slowly and count: /b/ /oa/ /t/, three sounds from four letters, which is what the sound boxes below are for.

Oa and ow are the pair to learn together, because they sound identical. Position is what separates them: oa in the middle, ow at the end. That rule holds, which is unusual for a long-vowel spelling and is why it leads this page.

Vowel team words has oa alongside the other teams, grouped by team rather than by sound.

Ow goes at the end of a word and spells the same sound as oa. Snow, grow, slow, low, blow, throw. Two letters, one sound, one box.

And ow also spells a completely different sound. Cow, how, now, down, brown. Those glide: your mouth moves through the sound rather than holding it still. There is no rule that tells you which job the letters are doing, so this is genuinely learned word by word, and it is worth telling a child that outright rather than letting them look for a rule that is not there.

Oe is a short list at the end of a word: toe, hoe, doe, foe. It does the same job as ow in the same position, which is one more thing English did not need to do twice.

Two endings make the o long even though nothing on the page marks it: -old and -ost. Old, cold, gold, told, hold. Most, post, host. There is no silent e and no letter team, which makes these the only long o words a child cannot see the reason for.

-old is the most reliable ending in the whole long-vowel set. Every common word ending -old has a long o. -ost is the weaker half: most, post and host follow it, and cost and lost do not, so those two are the exceptions to name.

Point at the ending rather than the vowel. A child looking for the long o in cold has nothing to find; a child who learns that words ending -old sound like cold has something they can use on a word they have never seen.

Say the two words one after the other and ask which one you said second. Hop and hope. Not and note. Rob and robe. The silent e is the whole difference in each pair, and seeing it added to a word your child already reads is the clearest demonstration of what it does.

The short words here are hot, pot and mop rather than dog, and that is deliberate. Short o is the one vowel whose sound is not the same across American English: for a lot of speakers the o in dog is not the o in pot. These three are stable everywhere, so the sheet cannot be wrong about them.

The picture sort works by sound and the word sort works by sight. Both are the same question asked at two different stages.

Where to go next depends on which part your child found hard.

• If snow and cow are still running together, that is the right thing to be stuck on and it is memory rather than a rule. Come back to it a word at a time.
• If the oa and ow position rule landed, long a words has the same shape with ai and ay, so it will land faster.
• If cold and most are being read with a short o, they are the words to come back to last: they have no marker, so they are memory rather than decoding.
• Long vowel sounds explains all five long vowels together, with a printable chart, and long vowel words mixes all five with a picture sort and a game.