The Total Analysis of US English Phoneme Spellings and Frequency.
This table is amazing. This video shows a unique truespel analysis of phonemes and they way they are spelled in US English. Hit the expand button and pause to review the table.
The 40 phonemes of US English are listed down the page with the most frequent phoneme ~n at top and least frequent ~zh at bottom. For each phoneme the frequency counts for the top 6 ways they are spelled in US English are given. Because these are the 5k most frequent words of US English they are about 90% of words typically used. This is practically the whole big cake of phonemes and spellings for all of US English divided into 40x6 pieces of different size. Thus each piece is comparable; for instance it can be said that the ~v sound is spelled by the letter "f" (536,000, as in "of" ~uv) about the same frequency as the ~ee sound by the letter "i" (536,000, as in "king" ~keeng). Who knew.
Nowhere else is this analysis available.
Enjoy phonetics with truespel which allows spreadsheet applications.
Total analysis of US English phoneme frequency spellings in print (and speech)
Comments
Thanks for sharing this Screencast, Tom. When teaching, I have long referred to a similar list I found years ago of the most common spellings for English phonemes. Prioritizing pronunciation and reading instruction based on currency is surely valuable!
I found another "Catalog of Most Frequent Spellings" that members may want to check out on the Auburn University website.
Tom and all, please let us know how having such information supports your instruction.
Cheers, Susan Finn Miller
Moderator, English Language Acquisition CoP