More Letters, More Sounds
Letters like b, d, f, g, h, and c add more consonant sounds, and many words end with a consonant you can name. · 9 min
You already know some letters and the sounds they make. Here come more: b, d, f, g, h, and c. Each one is a sound your mouth makes — and a sound many words end with, too. Touch each letter and say its sound out loud, quick and short: /b/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /h/, /k/. Say the sound, not the letter's name.
Guess before you learn
Your friend points at the letter b and makes its sound out loud. Which one is the sound the letter b makes?
The sound is a quick /b/. Bee is only the letter's name, and the name does not help you read. And drop the uh — buh sneaks in an extra sound that is not really in the word, which makes sounding out harder later. Say it clean: /b/. Most people add that uh at first; trimming it off is the whole trick.
K–2
3–5
Say the sound, not the letter's name. The letter b is named bee, but its sound is a quick /b/. Keep it clean — do not stretch it into buh, because that extra uh is not really in the word. The same letter makes the same sound at the start of a word and at the end: /b/ begins bat and closes cab.
The letter c is a copycat. On its own it has no sound; in cat, cup, and cab it borrows /k/. Now listen to the end of a word, not only the start: bed ends in /d/, leaf ends in /f/, and dog ends in /g/. The last little sound you hear is the ending consonant.
6–8
A consonant sound is made by getting in the air's way. For /b/, /d/, and /g/ you block the air completely, then release it — these are called stops. For /f/ and /h/ you only narrow the path and let the air hiss through. Feel the difference: /b/ pops, /f/ leaks.
Two consonants can be made in the very same place yet differ by one thing: your voice. Put a hand on your throat and say /b/ — it buzzes. Now say /p/ — same lips, no buzz. That buzz, called voicing, is what separates many pairs of consonants.
9–12
Linguists sort consonants by three questions. Where is the airflow blocked — the place of articulation? For /b/ it is the two lips; for /f/, the lip and teeth; for /d/, the ridge behind the teeth; for /g/, the soft palate; for /h/, the open throat. How is it blocked — the manner? A full closure makes a stop; a narrow channel makes a fricative. And is the voice on or off?
So /b/ is a voiced bilabial stop and /p/ its voiceless twin; /g/ is a voiced velar stop; /f/ a voiceless labiodental fricative; /h/ a voiceless glottal fricative. Six letters, but underneath them a small grid of choices: where the air is blocked, how it is blocked, and whether the voice hums along.
K–2
Your mouth makes each sound in its own spot. Press your lips together and pop them open: /b/. Lift your tongue behind your top teeth and tap: /d/. Rest your teeth on your lip and blow: /f/.
Now open your hand near your mouth and huff: /h/ — a warm puff of air. Say each sound quick and short. Do not add uh at the end.
Undergrad
The alphabetic principle promises that letters stand for sounds, but the mapping is many-to-many. The letter c is the clearest cheat: it carries no sound of its own, standing for /k/ before a, o, or u — cat, cot, cut — and for /s/ before e, i, or y — cent, city, cyst. One letter, two jobs, chosen by the vowel that follows.
The reverse happens too: a single sound wears many spellings — /k/ shows up as c, k, and ck. Early phonics teaches the reliable, high-frequency matches first, c as /k/ and g as /g/, and saves the exceptions for later, so a beginner meets a code that mostly behaves before meeting the code that sometimes does not.
Postgrad
Phonology breaks each of these segments into distinctive features — plus or minus voice, plus or minus continuant, and place features like labial, coronal, and dorsal — so that /b/ and /p/ differ in exactly one specification and natural classes fall out cleanly. The throat-buzz a child feels is the feature plus-voice; the pop versus hiss they hear is minus-continuant against plus-continuant.
The letters are a lossy transcription of that feature system. English spelling is morphophonemic rather than strictly phonetic: it often keeps a spelling stable across a sound change to protect meaning — the c that says /k/ in electric shifts to /s/ in electricity, yet the word stays recognizable. The beginner is handed the surface of a deep system, sound-first, because the sounds are where the regularities live.
consonant
A sound you make by blocking or squeezing the air with your lips, teeth, or tongue — like /b/, /d/, /f/, /g/, /h/, and /k/. The letters b, d, f, g, h, and c stand for consonant sounds.
You have been listening to the first sound in a word. Now listen to the other end. Say a word slowly and hold the very last bit: caaab — /b/. beeed — /d/. leaaaf — /f/. doooog — /g/. That last little sound is the ending consonant. Every one of these words ends with a sound you can name.
Now you know more sounds — b, d, f, g, h, and c — and you can hear the last sound in a word as well as the first. Cab ends in /b/. Leaf ends in /f/. Next you meet the middle of the word: the short vowel sounds that sit at its heart and let you sound a whole word out, first sound to last.