Year 1 vocabulary glossary

letter sound

The sound a letter or group of letters makes, such as the sound 's' makes at the start of 'sun'.

grapheme

A letter or group of letters that represents one sound, such as 'sh' or 'ee'.

phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a word, such as the three sounds in 'cat': c-a-t.

blending

Joining sounds together in order to read a word, such as blending c-a-t to read 'cat'.

segmenting

Splitting a word up into its separate sounds, such as splitting 'cat' into c-a-t, usually to help spell it.

decode

To work out how to read a word by sounding out its letters.

common exception word

A word that cannot be sounded out using normal phonics rules and has to be learned by sight, such as 'the' or 'said'.

contraction

A shortened form of two words with an apostrophe in place of missing letters, such as 'don't' for 'do not'.

sentence

A group of words that makes complete sense on its own, usually with a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end.

capital letter

A large letter used at the start of a sentence or for a name, such as 'A' instead of 'a'.

full stop

The punctuation mark ( . ) used to show the end of a sentence.

finger space

The small gap left between words when writing, about the width of a finger.

caption

A short piece of writing that describes a picture.

word

A single unit of language with its own meaning, made up of one or more letters.

noun

A word that names a person, place, animal or thing, such as 'dog', 'school' or 'happiness'.

verb

A word that describes an action or a state, such as 'run', 'jump' or 'is'.

singular

Describing just one of something, such as 'cat'.

plural

Describing more than one of something, such as 'cats'.

question mark

The punctuation mark ( ? ) used at the end of a question.

exclamation mark

The punctuation mark ( ! ) used at the end of a sentence to show strong feeling.

opposite

A word that means the reverse of another word, such as 'hot' and 'cold'.

synonym

A word that means almost the same as another word, such as 'happy' and 'glad'.

context

The words and sentences around a word that help you work out what it means.