Digraphs Explained: Two Letters, One Sound

A digraph is two letters that make one sound. In ship, the s and h don’t make /s/ and /h/; together they make a new sound, /sh/. The word ship has four letters but only three sounds: /sh/ /i/ /p/.

The word comes from Greek: di means two, and graph means writing. Two letters, one sound.

You might also hear these terms:

• Consonant digraph: two consonants making one sound, like sh, ch, th.
• Vowel digraph: two letters making one vowel sound, like ai, ee, oa.
• Trigraph: three letters making one sound, like igh in night.
• Blend (or consonant cluster): two consonants next to each other where you hear both sounds, like st in stop. Blends aren’t digraphs.

The difference between a digraph and a blend matters. In stop you can hear /s/ and /t/. In shop you can’t hear /s/ or /h/ at all.

These are usually taught first, once your child knows most single letter sounds. See our guide to letter sounds in order for the single letters.

A note on th: it makes two slightly different sounds. In thin it’s a quiet, breathy sound; in this it’s buzzy. Children rarely notice the difference when reading, so you don’t need to teach them separately at first.

ck usually comes at the end of a short word after a short vowel: duck, back, sock. ph is less common in early books and is often taught later.

Vowel digraphs are introduced after the consonant digraphs. They’re where English spelling gets interesting, because many vowel sounds can be spelled more than one way. Start with one spelling for each sound.

Later, children learn other spellings of the same sounds: ay in day (another way to write the /ai/ sound), ea in sea, ie in pie, oy in boy, and so on. That’s best left until the first set is secure.

A typical home order:

1. sh, ch, th, the most common and easiest to hear.
2. ck, ng, which mostly appear at the ends of words.
3. qu and wh, if you haven’t already.
4. ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, the first vowel sounds spelled with more than one letter.
5. ar, or, ur, ow, oi, er.
6. Alternative spellings: ay, ea, ie, oy, ir, ew and others.

Spend about a week on each new digraph, or longer if your child needs it. Keep reviewing old ones every day.

1. Say the sound. “This is /sh/, like when we tell someone to be quiet.”
2. Show the letters. Write sh large. “When s and h are together, they’re best friends and make one sound: /sh/.”
3. Read words. ship, shop, fish. Underline the sh in each word to show it’s one sound.
4. Count sounds, not letters. “Fish has four letters but how many sounds? /f/ /i/ /sh/. Three!”
5. Spell words. Say shed; your child segments it (/sh/ /e/ /d/) and writes it, using sh for the first sound.

Using sound buttons helps: a dot under single-letter sounds and a short line under digraphs. Ship gets a line under sh, then a dot under i and p.

• Sounding out each letter. “/s/ /h/ /i/ /p/” won’t make ship. Underline digraphs so your child knows to say them as one sound.
• Mixing up sh and ch. Practice pairs: ship/chip, shop/chop, shin/chin.
• Missing the digraph in spelling. Your child writes sip for ship. Ask them to count the sounds, then check each one.
• Th and f. Some children say fin for thin. Practice in front of a mirror: tongue between teeth for /th/, teeth on lip for /f/.

Once your child knows a few digraphs, decodable books suddenly become much more interesting, with words like shop, chip, moon and rain. See our list of phonics books for beginning readers for series that introduce digraphs in a steady order. And if blending longer words is tricky, our guide on how to teach blending has methods that work for digraph words too.

Digraphs make spelling a little more interesting, because your child has to remember that one sound can need two letters. Try this:

1. Say a word, such as chop.
2. Your child says its sounds and counts them on their fingers: /ch/ /o/ /p/, three sounds.
3. Draw three lines on paper, one for each sound.
4. Your child writes one sound on each line, so ch shares the first line.

The “one sound, one line” rule makes it clear that ch belongs together. It works for vowel digraphs too: rain is three lines, /r/ /ai/ /n/.

When your child is spelling longer words, remind them of the same process they use for reading: say the word, hear the sounds, write a spelling for each one. Our guide on how to teach phonics at home explains segmenting in more detail, and the tricky words for kindergarten list covers common words that don’t follow the patterns yet.