"During the Great Vowel Shift, the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in ...

Read about the longest English word without a vowel, Rhythm. Learn its meaning, origin, pronunciation, and examples of other ...

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. You might have learned it as a chant, a song, or a simple declaration, but this is how you learned the vowels of English. You may have wondered, why is Y so unsure of ...

Isabel Simmons explores how to blend, read, and write words with long o and ow, including snow, grow, and coach. Let's Learn is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone ...

How many vowels does English have? Five, right? A, E, I, O, U. Oh, and sometimes Y. So, six? Actually, English has at least 14 different vowel sounds and, depending on the speaker and dialect, maybe ...

When we hear a sentence, or a line of poetry, our brains automatically transform the stream of sound into a sequence of syllables. But scientists haven't been sure exactly how the brain does this. Now ...

What is a digraph? Well, there are plenty of them in English and it’s where two ‘written letters’ represent one phonetic sound. For example, in the word ‘phonetic’. the first two letters <ph> are ...

An acoustical analysis of the grunts, barks, wahoos, copulation calls, and yaks from baboons shows that, like people who use several vowels during speech, these nonhuman primates make five distinct ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

The sound of a word like “knife” or “truck” seems totally arbitrary–it’s just a random sound we’ve assigned to a thing, right? But for several decades, scientists have found good evidence that the ...