Sounds and spellings

What phase is igh?

'igh' is introduced in Phase 3 of Letters and Sounds. It is a trigraph: three letters standing for a single sound, as in night.

Phase 3. It arrives alongside the other vowel digraphs and trigraphs of that phase — ai, ee, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure and er.

It is a trigraph, not three sounds

A trigraph is three letters that together stand for one sound. In night there are five letters and three sounds:n — igh — t. Theg and the h are not silent letters doing nothing; all three letters belong to one spelling.

This matters when a child is sounding a word out. Treatingigh as three separate letters produces nonsense, and a child who does it has usually not been shown that the three travel together.

Words using 'igh'

The set is small and closed, which makes it easier to teach than most vowel spellings.

• night, light, right, sight, might, fight, tight, bright, fright
• high, sigh, thigh, nigh
• Longer words: frightened, lightning, delightful, midnight

The same sound, spelled other ways

igh is one of several spellings for the same vowel sound, and the others are introduced at different points. A child who knowsigh has not automatically met the rest.

• igh — Phase 3 — night
• ie — Phase 5 — pie, tie
• i–e split digraph — Phase 5 — time, bike
• y — Phase 5 — by, my, sky
• i on its own — Phase 5, as an alternative pronunciation —find, kind, child

That last one is worth noticing. The letter i is taught in Phase 2 as the sound in tin. In find it stands for the sound in night instead, and Letters and Sounds does not introduce that use until Phase 5 — so find is not a Phase 2 word, despite containing only Phase 2 letters.

To see which spellings in a passage are introduced by a given point,the free text checker will mark them.