[General] is there a dictionary to check if a word complies to phonic rules?

Dear teacher,

I am trying to teach my son spelling words. I want to pick out all words that comply to phonic rules, but I am not sure if I pick the right ones. Is there a dictionary that I can check?

Thanks a lot!

Oxford offer a phonics dictionary, together with some free resources:

https://global.oup.com/education/co...ctionary-free-resources/?region=international

Thanks a lot! I wonder how native speakers tell whether a word complies to phonic rules or are somewhat spelled "irregularly".

English spelling being more irregular than not, we learn to recognize whole words and use phonics to guess the pronunciation of unfamiliar ones. Beginning readers read books containing very limited vocabulary; they usually know nearly every word by ear, so they can successfully guess how to say each word even when the spelling doesn't match the pronunciation very well.

Thanks for answers above guys. Here are a few words that I am trying to tell whether they could be spelled correctly just by sounding them out: lion/zebra/valley/fault/fall/want/bird.

Multiple letter/letter combinations can correspond to the same sound. How do you guys tell which one to use when trying to guess a word? Or you don't if you've never seen the word before?

Thanks

harriet_yang said:

Or you don't if you've never seen the word before?

Click to expand...

It's easy to make mistakes with some words without checking. I have made mistakes with words that I have only read- my pronunciation of Episcopal, which I had only seen in books, greatly amused some Christians once, who were familiar with the word in spoken language.

harriet_yang said:

Here are a few words that I am trying to tell whether they could be spelled correctly just by sounding them out: lion/zebra/valley/fault/fall/want/bird.

Multiple letter/letter combinations can correspond to the same sound. How do you guys tell which one to use when trying to guess a word? Or you don't if you've never seen the word before?

Click to expand...

Only one pronunciation is possible for bird, though exactly what that is depends on your dialect. In any standard English dialect, an i followed by two consonants always becomes a schwa sound. The dialect determines whether you pronounce the r or just use it to color the preceding vowel.

Other than that, all the words on your list are familiar to children around the age they're learning to read, so they can "sound them out" (pronounce them according to phonetic guidelines), then find a word they know which is a near match to the sound they produce.

I'm afraid the conclusion is that your task is easier for native Anglophones. We know how a couple of thousand common words are pronounced before we start learning to read them. Phonetics can guide us to guess which word a string of letters represents, so we have a very good chance of guessing right. Many of us have certain rarer words which we mispronounce until we learn better. A family friend pronounced misled as if it were the past participle of the (nonexistent) verb "to misle".

I see that I haven't asked this question the right way. Here is what I was trying to achieve. My son's teacher gave him a hundred words for spelling bee. At first I tried to split the words into two groups: one phonetically regular (meaning by sounding them out he should be able to spell them), the other group phonetically irregular. Then I found the issue: i don't know how to split. Here are the word list. Words like King/best/sky/save/ are what I think phonetically regular. While for zebra/rhino, i really don't know. How do you suggest to split the words? Thanks!