The five long vowels and how they are spelled

A long vowel says the letter's name. Each one has four to eight regular spellings, and which spelling a word takes is largely decided by position.

Letter sounds

a e i o u saying their names LONG_VOWEL_01

Useful pattern · Medium reliability · Very common · Early · Reading and spelling

• /eɪ/ long a: cake, rain, play
• /iː/ long e: tree, beach, happy
• /aɪ/ long i: bike, night, cry
• /əʊ/ long o: home, boat, snow
• /juː/ /uː/ long u: cube, blue, flew

Where Wiggler teaches it: Skill 6: Magic e · Skill 7: Open & Closed Syllables + Y · Skill 9: Vowel Teams (Long)

Child explanation

Sometimes a vowel says its own name — a in cake, e in tree, i in bike, o in home, u in cube. There is more than one way to spell each of those sounds.

The rule

Each long vowel sound has a small set of regular spellings. Position decides between them more often than anything else: ai and oi inside a word, ay and oy at the end; igh before t, y at the end.

What is really going on

The five tense vowels are each spelled by a set of graphemes whose distribution is governed largely by position within the word and by what follows. For reading, the practical consequence is that the long vowel spellings must be learned as units — a child who meets rain and tries to decode a-i-n letter by letter gets nothing usable.

Why English does this

The long vowels sound nothing like their Latin values because of the Great Vowel Shift, a change in English pronunciation that ran through the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Spelling had already been fixed by printing, so the letters record the older pronunciation and the names record the newer one.

Position in the word

• Middle of a word — The inside-a-word spellings: ai, oi, ea, oa, and the magic e patterns. For example: rain, coin, beach, boat, cake.
• End of a word — The end-of-word spellings: ay, oy, ee, ow, y. For example: play, boy, tree, snow, cry.

Examples

Easy examples

cake, tree, bike, home, cube

More examples

rain, play, beach, green, night, cry, boat, snow, blue, flew, these, pie, toe, rescue

Advanced examples

eight, chief, though, ceiling, height

Pseudo-words

Made-up words that follow the rule. A child who reads these has the pattern rather than the vocabulary.

blay, greep, shight, coat, fute

Contrast pairs

• cap versus cape — Short versus long a.
• kit versus kite — Short versus long i.
• not versus note — Short versus long o.
• cub versus cube — Short versus long u.

Do not teach it like this

"When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."

It holds for ai, ay, ea, ee, oa and oe, and fails for oi, oy, ou, ow, oo, au, aw, ew, ui and ie — roughly half the vowel teams a child meets, including some of the commonest.

"Some pairs of letters are a team with their own sound." Then teach the teams one at a time.

Teacher note

The phrase "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking" is the best-known rule in phonics and it is wrong often enough to be harmful — it fails on bread, said, look, book, soup, coin, cow, chief and hundreds more. Teach each vowel team as its own grapheme with its own sound and its own reliability rating. That is more entries to learn and far fewer wrong guesses.

Accent notes

• General American — Long o is /oʊ/; long u after t, d and n is often /uː/ rather than /juː/, so tune and dune lose the /j/ glide.
• British English — Long o is /əʊ/, and the /j/ in tune and new is generally kept.
• Indian English — Long a and long o are frequently monophthongs — /eː/ and /oː/ rather than glides. This is a systematic feature of the accent, not an error, and does not affect which grapheme a child should map the sound to.

Learn these first

• The five short vowels — a e i o u in a closed syllable — A single vowel with a consonant after it and nothing else is usually short. This is the rule that makes CVC words decodable.

Related rules

• Magic e — v_e — A vowel, one consonant, then e. The e says nothing and the vowel says its name. Reliable — as long as the child knows what it does not cover.
• AI — ai — Long a inside a word. Pairs with ay, which does the same job at the end — ai almost never ends an English word.
• EE — ee — Long e, in any position, with essentially no exceptions. The single most reliable vowel team in English.
• Open syllable — CV — A syllable ending in a vowel. The vowel is long — go, me, hi, robot, paper.
• The letter Y — y — The clearest case in English of position deciding sound. Y is a consonant at the start of a word and a vowel everywhere else — and which vowel depends on how many syllables the word has.

• Previous in Letter sounds: The five short vowels — a e i o u in a closed syllable — A single vowel with a consonant after it and nothing else is usually short. This is the rule that makes CVC words decodable.
• Next in Letter sounds: The letter A — a — Five pronunciations, decided by what follows: a consonant, a silent e, an r, an l, or nothing much at all.
• All reading rules

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