Short Vowel Sounds

A short vowel is the sound a, e, i, o or u makes in cat, bed, pig, hop and sun. It is one quick sound, not the letter’s name. Most phonics teaching pairs each one with a picture word and keeps that word for good: a as in apple, e as in egg, i as in igloo, o as in octopus, u as in umbrella.

The single most useful thing to know is that short e and short i are the two children swap, and they swap them because the mouth barely moves between the two sounds. Everything else on this page is ordinary practice. That pair is the one worth going out of your way for.

Word lists for each vowel are at the bottom of this page: short a, short e, short i, short o and short u.

What is a short vowel?

A short vowel is a single, quick sound made by one vowel letter. Say cat and stop in the middle: that sound is short a. Say bed and stop in the middle: short e.

The word “short” is about the sound, not the word. A short vowel does not mean a short word, and it does not mean the sound is rushed. It means the vowel is not saying its own name, which is what a long vowel does.

Every vowel letter makes more than one sound in English. The short sound is the one those letters make most often in the simple words a child reads first, which is why it is taught first and why almost every early reading book is built out of it.

Short vowels are a kindergarten standard, not an optional extra. Common Core’s foundational-skills standard RF.K.3b asks kindergartners to associate the long and the short sounds with common spellings for the five major vowels, which is exactly what this page covers. If your child is in kindergarten and short vowels are new to them, they are on time.

What are the five short vowel sounds?

Letter	Sound	Keyword	Words
a	/a/	apple	cat, map, bag
e	/e/	egg	bed, hen, net
i	/i/	igloo	pig, lid, six
o	/o/	octopus	hot, pot, mop
u	/u/	umbrella	bug, sun, cup

Say the letter, then the keyword, then the sound, in that order, every time. “a, apple, /a/”. The order matters less than the sameness: your child is building one reliable route from a letter on a page to a sound in their mouth, and a keyword that changes week to week is not a route.

These are the sounds of General American English. Short o is the one that varies most: in much of the United States the o in dog and log is said differently from the o in hot and pot. That is why the short o examples here are hot, pot and mop, which are the same everywhere, and why short o words explains it rather than pretending the variation is not there.

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Free printable short vowel sounds chart

The chart below is one PDF: a wall page with all five sounds, a page on how each one is made, the long-vowel twins, the e and i mix-up, and a blank mat for tonight's words. No account, no email, no watermark. Print page one, put it where your child will see it, and leave the rest until you want it.

1. Short Vowel Sounds Chart (PDF)5 short vowel sounds · 6 pagesDownload

What is the difference between a short vowel and a long vowel?

A long vowel says the letter’s own name; a short vowel does not. That single sentence is the whole distinction, and it is enough for a five-year-old.

Short	Long
cap	cape
them	theme
kit	kite
hop	hope
cub	cube

The silent e on the end is what flips it, which is the pattern silent-e words is built around. It is not the only way English writes a long vowel, though: long vowel sounds takes all five of them and the four spellings each one gets.

Short e is the odd one out, and it is worth saying so. Them and theme is close to the only clean short-to-long e pair English offers. Long e is usually spelled with two letters instead: ee in feet, ea in read. That is not a gap in the teaching, it is a fact about the language.

Short vowels come first. Most children read short vowel words for months before silent e turns up, and what order to teach phonics skills puts the whole sequence in order.

Which short vowels do kids mix up?

Short e and short i, by a distance. Pin and pen. Bit and bet. Tin and ten. Lid and led.

The reason is physical, and it is worth understanding rather than working around. Say pen, then pin, in front of a mirror. Your tongue is in almost the same place and your mouth opens almost the same amount. There is very little for a child to hear, and nothing at all for them to see. Compare that with a and o, where the jaw visibly drops, and it is obvious why one pair causes trouble and the other does not.

Practising them apart is what lets the confusion survive. A week of short i, then a week of short e, and your child has never once had to choose between them. Choosing is the entire skill.

So put them together on purpose. Read the pairs across: pen, pin. Ten, tin. Bet, bit. Then say one of the two and ask your child to point at the one you said. Ten seconds, and it is worth more than a page of either vowel alone. Short i words carries the full list and a sorting worksheet built for exactly this.

Short e	Short i
pen	pin
ten	tin
bet	bit
beg	big
led	lid
set	sit

Short o and short u are the second pair, more quietly: hot and hut, cop and cup, not and nut. It turns up less often and responds to the same fix.

How to teach short vowels, step by step

1. 1

   You say the sound, not the letter's name

   Point at the letter and say /a/, the sound at the start of apple. Not 'ay'. A child who learns that A says ay cannot read cat, because there is no ay in it. Name the letter when you write it; say the sound when you read it.

2. 2

   You pair every sound with one keyword, forever

   a, apple, /a/. Say the row the same way every time. Months from now the keyword is what your child will reach for when they are stuck, so it has to be the same word each time rather than whichever one comes to mind.

3. 3

   Your child finds the sound in the middle of a word

   Say cat slowly and ask what sound is in the middle. This is the step that matters and the one that is hardest: a vowel at the start of a word is easy to hear, and a vowel between two consonants is where reading actually needs it.

4. 4

   Your child reads words with that vowel, mixing the endings

   Cat, map, bag, fan. Not cat, hat, mat, which can be read by changing only the first letter. Changing the ending forces your child to read all three letters, which is the difference between a word family and a vowel.

5. 5

   Both of you put e and i side by side on purpose

   Pin and pen, bit and bet, tin and ten. These two are the pair children swap, and practising each alone is what lets the confusion survive. Say one and ask your child to point at it.

Teach them in a planned order rather than as words come up. The National Reading Panel reviewed 38 studies yielding 66 comparisons and found that systematic phonics, meaning a planned sequence taught directly, works significantly better than teaching phonics as words happen to turn up. It found no single best order, so the sequence on this page is one reasonable order rather than the only one. What order to teach phonics skills has the whole sequence.

Step three is the one that decides everything. Hearing a vowel at the start of a word is easy, which is why apple and egg make good keywords. Hearing it in the middle, between two consonants, is the skill reading actually needs, and it is much harder. If your child can do everything on this page except that, the work is hearing the sounds in words rather than more letters, and Elkonin sound boxes are the tool for it.

What are good short vowel games and songs?

The vowel songs work, and they work for one specific reason: they attach each sound to a tune, and a tune is far easier for a four-year-old to recall than a sound. Any of the common short vowel songs will do. What matters is that the keyword in the song matches the keyword on your chart.

Three things that need nothing but you:

• I spy with the middle sound. “I spy something with /o/ in the middle.” Harder than it sounds, and it is exactly the skill in step three.
• Change the vowel. Say cat, then ask for cot, cut, kit. One letter moves and the word changes, which is the whole of what a vowel does.
• Sort the shopping. Anything in the kitchen with a short a goes on the left, short o on the right. Tins, jam, pot, bag.

On a screen, the thing to look for is whether the game asks for the middle sound. Plenty of phonics apps drill first sounds and letter names and never once make a child choose between two vowels, which is where the difficulty actually is.

Where are the short vowel word lists?

Each vowel has its own list, with the words split by where the sound falls and free worksheets for each group.

• Short a words, a as in apple. Cat, map, bag, fan, ham, sad.
• Short e words, e as in egg. Bed, hen, net, leg, jet, web.
• Short i words, i as in igloo. Pig, lid, win, sit, zip, six.
• Short o words, o as in octopus. Hot, pot, mop, top, cob, dot.
• Short u words, u as in umbrella. Bug, sun, cup, nut, tub, gum.

Short vowel words mixes all five on one page, with a picture sort, a fill-in-the-vowel sheet and a five-column word sort. That is the page to use once the individual vowels are going, because a child who can read a page of one vowel is not yet choosing between five.

If you want the words grouped by their ending rather than their vowel, that is a word family, and CVC words has a section for almost every one: -at, -an, -ap and the rest, 25 families across the five vowels in 24 sections, since the two smallest, -up and -um, share one. Families are the faster start. Vowels are the harder and more useful next step, and the CVC page says so itself.

The five vowels are not equally supplied, and it shows in how much there is to practise. Short a and short u have six common word families each, short i has five, and short e and short o have four. In a 1970 study of teaching vowels, Richard Wylie and Donald Durrell identified 37 common endings of this kind across all the vowels.

Vowel	Common CVC families	The families
a	6	-at, -an, -ap, -ad, -ag, -am
e	4	-et, -en, -ed, -eg
i	5	-it, -ig, -in, -ip, -id
o	4	-ot, -op, -og, -ob
u	6	-ug, -un, -up, -ut, -ub, -um

That is why short e words is the thinnest of the five lists and says so on the page, rather than padding itself with words a five-year-old has never heard.