The -gh- letter pattern
In this lesson we're looking at the difficult -gh- letter pattern. I've included a video, a spelling test and pronunciation guide to really help you with these tricky words.
The video has all the pronunciation sounds below.
We use -gh- in very common words like: though, right, daughter, weigh, cough, brought, enough
And we use it in common letter patterns: -ough, -augh-, -eigh-, -igh-.
But why have we got these “stupid-looking” words? And how do you remember how to pronounce them and spell them?
It's all to do with the history of gh.
Notice the h in the original Anglo-Saxon words (in brackets).
daughter (dohtor), night (niht), light (liht), bright (beorht),
bough (bōh), rough (ruh), brought (brohte)
Let’s look at how this phonetic h became the silent gh or “f” sound.
1. The h in the original Saxon spelling was a hard, throaty guttural sound like the Scottish sound in loch (listen on video above).
2. Around the 13th century, the h became gh because of the French influence to try to indicate this throaty sound.
3. In about the 17th century, the gh sound became silent: though, through, plough, borough, slaughter, nought/naught, or became an “f” sound: enough, cough, rough, laugh.
Some dialects may have pronounced the “f” in cough, enough, Clough, rough, laugh, draught, Brough.
Notice that daughter, laugh, draught, naughty, slaughter, taught now have the ‘au’ pattern, which was added by the French too.
We leave the gh in the spelling to show the origins and history of the world.
-ough- has seven sounds. Read this sentence: Have you thought this through thoroughly enough?
*Sometimes the 'gh' at the end is silent sometimes a f sound- no rules about this.
“throo” through
”off” cough trough
”uff” enough, rough, tough
”oh” dough, though, although, (thorough, borough — American accent)
"how" bough
"uh" borough, thorough (British accent)
"or" bought, brought, fought, nought, ought, sought, wrought, thought
Check out the though, through, thorough, thought video
-augh- normally sounds like "or", "door/nor" — daughter "dort a", naughty, slaughter, taught, haughty
but laugh is pronounced with a long or short ‘a’- "laff" or "larff"
-eigh- normally sounds like "ay", "say, day" — eight, neighbour, weigh, weight, sleigh but height rhymes with bite!!
-igh- sounds like i in "tie" — high, sigh, thigh, light, delight, sight, might, night, right, tight, flight
Other -gh- patterns
The -gh- you see at the beginning of words in ghost, ghastly, aghast, gherkin, ghoul, ghetto have various origins.
The gh- spellings in ghost, ghastly, aghast were introduced by the printer Caxton in the fifteenth century to signal the hard “g” sound. He lived many years in Flemish countries and introduced the Flemish way of spelling words with a gh-.
From the Arabic Ghoul from ghūl.
From Italian where -gh- is a hard “g” sound: ghetto, spaghetti, sorghum
From Hindi: ghee, ghat, dinghy
Places: Ghana, Ghent, Ghaziabad, Ghazipur
