English has 26 letters but more than 40 distinct sounds (phonemes). Depending on which dialect you count, the number is 43, 44, or 45. We’re going with 43 — the count used by the UK Letters and Sounds curriculum and the ABC Phonics app. Here’s the full breakdown.
The 43 phonemes at a glance
Tap any sound to hear it spoken by a native voice. The full phoneme map has audio + mouth shape + example words for each.
26 single-letter sounds
Each letter A–Z makes one main sound (some make two, like C and G; we teach the most common first):
- Stops: /b/, /d/, /g/, /k/ (c, k), /p/, /t/.
- Continuants: /f/, /h/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /r/, /s/, /v/, /w/, /y/, /z/.
- Vowels: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ (short forms).
- Special: /j/, /kw/ (qu), /ks/ (x).
10 consonant digraphs and trigraphs
- ch as in chip.
- sh as in ship.
- th (voiced) as in this; th (voiceless) as in thin.
- ng as in ring.
- ph as in phone.
- wh as in whale.
- ck as in duck.
- tch as in catch.
- dge as in bridge.
7 long vowels and vowel teams
- ai / ay — rain, day.
- ee / ea — bee, sea.
- oa / ow — boat, snow.
- oo (short) — book.
- oo (long) — moon.
- ie / igh — pie, light.
- ue / ew — blue, new.
3 diphthongs
- oi / oy — coin, boy.
- ow / ou — cow, out.
- au / aw — sauce, paw.
3 r-controlled vowels
- ar — car.
- or — fork.
- er / ir / ur — her, bird, turn.
How to teach all 43 in 9 months
Most synthetic-phonics programmes spread the 43 phonemes across 11 units over a school year. At 5–10 minutes of practice per day:
- Months 1–3: 26 single letters.
- Months 4–6: consonant digraphs + first vowel teams.
- Months 7–9: long vowels, diphthongs, r-controlled.
That’s an aggressive but achievable timeline for a kid starting at age 4. For a 3-year-old, double it.
The 1 phoneme everyone gets wrong
The schwa /ə/ — the “uh” sound in the unstressed syllable of “sofa,” “banana,” “the.” It’s the most common vowel sound in English and almost nobody teaches it explicitly. We skip it in early phonics because it doesn’t map cleanly to a spelling, but it’s worth knowing it exists when your kid hits more advanced words like “about” or “along.”
Practice it now
Open the phoneme map with a 4-year-old and let them tap to hear each sound. Then try Sound Match to test sound-to-picture recognition. The whole catalog is free in the browser.