What Are Sight Words?

Sight words are the words a child reads instantly, without sounding them out, and at school the term usually means a list of the most common words in children’s books. That list is the one that comes home in the folder, and it looks like a list to memorize. Most of it is not. The majority of the words on a sight word list follow the usual spelling patterns, so your child can sound them out, and only a handful break the patterns and have to be learned by heart. On our kindergarten list, built from the 25 most common words in English, only 9 are words to learn by heart.

So two different things share the name: the list your school sends, and the words your child can read at sight. The list is a target. Reading words at sight is the goal, and children reach it mostly by sounding words out until they stick.

What does “sight word” mean?

Sight words are words a reader recognizes instantly, at a glance, without stopping to work them out. The term is used in two ways, and they are worth keeping apart.

At school, sight words are a list. It holds the most common words in children’s books, such as the, and, said and was, and teachers send it home so children can practice reading those words quickly. You will also see it spelled “site words.” It means the same thing.

In reading research, a sight word is any word a reader knows instantly, whatever its spelling. For a fluent adult, almost every familiar word is a sight word. Reading researcher Linnea Ehri, in a 2014 paper in Scientific Studies of Reading, explains how words get there. She calls the process orthographic mapping: “the formation of letter-sound connections to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory.”

A child sounds a word out, connects its letters to its sounds, and after enough encounters reads it at a glance. Sounding out is the usual route to instant recognition, not an alternative to it.

Schools teach toward the first sense. The Common Core kindergarten standard, RF.K.3c, asks children to “read common high-frequency words by sight” and names ten examples: the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does. It names examples and gives no count.

Are sight words the same as high-frequency words?

Sight words and high-frequency words are usually the same words. High-frequency words are the most common words in print, and a school’s sight word list is made of those words, so teachers use the two terms interchangeably. The distinction that matters to a parent is a different one: within any list, some words can be sounded out and some cannot.

Most words on a list follow the usual spelling patterns. And, it, can and went read exactly as their letters say, so a child who knows letter sounds can read them. A smaller group has a part no spelling pattern explains. In said, the ai says “e.” In of, the f says “v.” These are often called heart words, because that part has to be learned by heart.

The heart words are a small share of any list. On our kindergarten list, 9 of the 25 words are heart words. Across all 220 words on the Dolch list, we count 49. Reading specialists Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter and Tina Osenga, writing for Reading Rockets, count 138 of the 220 Dolch words as decodable, which leaves 82. Our count is lower because it treats a word as decodable whenever it follows a pattern taught by third grade.

That makes “sight words or phonics?” a false choice. Phonics is how most of a sight word list gets learned. Even a heart word is mostly regular: in said, the s and the d do what your child expects, so your child sounds out those parts and memorizes only the ai. How to teach sight words walks through sorting a list that way.

Vocabulary words are something else again. A vocabulary word is one whose meaning a child is learning, like habitat or enormous. A sight word is about reading a word quickly, and a 5-year-old already knows what the and said mean.

How many sight words should my child know, by grade?

There is no national number. The Common Core kindergarten standard names ten example words and no count. The first and second grade standards, RF.1.3g and RF.2.3f, ask children to “recognize and read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words” and give no count either. Every target your child has been given was set by a district, a school or a teacher, and they vary: some kindergarten lists ask for 25 words, others for 100.

Reading researcher Timothy Shanahan says plainly that “the research is not terribly specific as to how many words should be taught or when,” so his own suggestions come from experience rather than from studies. The table below sets them beside the lists on this site.

Grade	A published guideline	On our lists	Heart words among them
Pre-K	None. Letter sounds, hearing sounds in words and rhyming come first	No list	None
Kindergarten	”Perhaps 20 words or so,” at least 10 of them high-frequency (Shanahan)	25 words (Fry 1-25)	9
1st grade	All of the 100 most frequent words by the end of the year (Shanahan)	75 more (Fry 26-100)	21
2nd grade	No published number. The standard asks for “grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words”	100 more (Fry 101-200)	22
3rd grade	No published number. The standard (RF.3.3d) asks children to “read grade-appropriate irregularly spelled words”	99 more (Fry 201-300, one left off)	18

Shanahan also notes that even with considerable effort, most children have not mastered that first hundred until around Thanksgiving of 1st grade, well into the year after the one most parents are worrying about.

Read the table as a guide, not a deadline. Three things follow from it.

A shorter list learned properly beats a longer list drilled. A child who reads twenty words without pausing is in better shape than one who has been marched through a hundred and hesitates on most of them.

Being behind the list is not the same as being behind in reading. Word counts are easy to measure, which is why schools measure them, and they are a narrow slice of what your child is learning. A wider set of check-ins by age is in is my child on track with reading?

The number matters less than whether the words transfer. Reading a word on a card is not the same skill as reading it in a book, and only one of those is the point. If the list feels out of step with your child, ask the teacher which words on it matter most, and start with those.

Which sight word list does my child’s school use?

Almost every school list comes from the Dolch list, the Fry list, or a district’s own blend of the two. There is no national list. Lists vary by state, by district and often by school, so the quickest way to tell is to compare the words that came home with the two lists, or to ask the teacher.

The two lists differ mainly in how they are sorted. The Dolch list, built by Edward Dolch in the 1930s and 40s, holds 220 words grouped by grade level from pre-primer through third grade, plus a separate list of 95 nouns. The Fry list, from Edward Fry, ranks the 1,000 most common words in English by how often they appear, in groups of a hundred. Dolch sorts by roughly when a child needs a word, and Fry by how common it is. Use the one your school sends. For a kindergartner the two barely differ: 21 of the 25 words on our kindergarten list are on Dolch’s pre-primer and primer levels. The Fry sight words page has the full comparison of Dolch and Fry.

Every list on this site sorts each word into one to sound out or one to learn by heart, with free worksheets for both:

• Kindergarten sight words: the first 25 Fry words, 16 to sound out and 9 heart words.
• 1st grade sight words: Fry words 26 to 100, 54 to sound out and 21 heart words.
• 2nd grade sight words: Fry words 101 to 200, 78 to sound out and 22 heart words.
• 3rd grade sight words: Fry words 201 to 300, less one we leave off, 81 to sound out and 18 heart words.
• Dolch sight words: all 220 Dolch words in five levels, pre-primer to third grade, 49 of them heart words.
• Fry sight words: the first 300 Fry words by hundred, less one, 229 to sound out and 70 heart words, linking each grade page’s worksheets.

What are the most common sight words?

The 25 most common words in English, the first 25 on the Fry list, are the words most kindergarten lists start with. Sorted the way this site sorts them, 16 can be sounded out and 9 have to be learned by heart:

Sound it out (16)	Learn by heart (9)
and, a, in, is, that, it, he, for, on, as, with, his, I, at, be, this	the, of, to, you, was, are, they, have, from

Eleven of the 16 use a pattern that comes a little after the first letter sounds. A, he, I and be end in a vowel that says its name. Is, as and his use an s that says /z/. That, with and this use th, and in for the r changes the vowel. Each is still a pattern your child will be taught, so those words become phonics practice rather than memory work.

The heart words are where the repetition goes. In the, the e says “uh”; in was, the a does. The rest of each word reads as its letters suggest.

These 25 words, with worksheets for both groups, are on our kindergarten list, and the next 175 continue on the 1st and 2nd grade lists above.

How do children learn sight words, and where do I start?

Start by sorting your school’s list into words to sound out and words to learn by heart, then practice for five to ten minutes on most days. Two or three new heart words a week is a good pace, and every session mixes in words learned before. Our guide to teaching sight words sets out the whole routine, from the sort to how to tell it is working.

Each next step below has a page of its own:

• If a word will not stick after weeks of practice, our guide to sight words that will not stick works through seven common reasons and what to change for each.
• For games instead of drills, play recognition games with heart words only, and let your child sound out the rest. Sight word games has nine you can play tonight with paper and a pen.
• For practice on a screen, best sight word apps compares nine of them on price, whether they take your child’s own list, and whether they are still updated.
• For printable practice, every list page above carries free worksheets for both groups of words.