o_e

Home, note, bone, rope. Reliable, with come, some, done, none, gone and one as a frequent irregular set.

Magic e / silent e

o_e MAGIC_E_O_01

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

• /əʊ/ long o: home, note, bone

Where Wiggler teaches it: Skill 6: Magic e

Child explanation

Not becomes note. But watch out for come, some and done — they look the same and do not follow the rule.

The rule

O, one consonant, then a silent e gives long o, /əʊ/ — with a set of very common exceptions where it gives /ʌ/ instead.

What is really going on

The pattern is consistent except for a group of high-frequency words descending from Old English forms with u, where the o is a scribal substitution and the final e is historical. Because those words — come, some, done, none, one, love — are among the first fifty words a child meets, this pattern needs its exception list from the beginning.

Examples

Easy examples

home, note, bone, rope, hope

More examples

hole, pole, code, rode, nose, rose, close, stone, smoke, broke, spoke, those, alone, phone

Pseudo-words

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

blode, shope, frone

Exceptions

• o_e saying /ʌ/: come, some, done, none, one, love, glove, above, shove. A medieval spelling substitution, not a sound rule. Very high frequency.
• gone and whose: gone, whose, lose, move, prove. One-off spellings with no productive pattern behind them.

Contrast pairs

• not versus note
• hop versus hope
• rob versus robe
• home versus come — Identical shape, different sound — the pair to teach explicitly.

Decodable sentences

• I hope to go home alone.
• The stone broke the rope.
• Those roses smell of smoke.

Teacher note

Teach home and come side by side rather than letting come appear as a failure later. Children accept that two words can look alike and sound different far more easily than they accept a rule that suddenly stops working.

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.
• a_e — a_e — The commonest magic e pattern and the most reliable. Cake, name, made, late — long a with a silent e two letters on.

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.
• The letter O — o — Short /ɒ/, long /əʊ/, and a stubborn group where o says /ʌ/ — son, come, love — for reasons that are about handwriting, not sound.
• OA — oa — Long o inside a word. Highly reliable, and like ai it does not end English words — ow does that.
• Heart words — the · was · said · come · some — Words with one part that cannot be decoded. Sound out the part that works, and learn by heart only the part that does not.

• Previous in Magic e / silent e: i_e — i_e — Bike, time, nine, ride. Highly reliable, with give and live as the two exceptions children meet earliest.
• Next in Magic e / silent e: u_e — u_e — Two sounds, not one: /juː/ in cube and mule, /uː/ in rule and June. Which one depends on the consonant before it.
• All reading rules

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