by Liz Walter
There are many common words in English that contain the pair of letters ‘gh’. ‘Gh’ can be pronounced /g/ (like ‘goat’), /f/ (like ‘fun’) or it can be silent, but in that case it will affect the vowels that come before it. Unfortunately, many of these pronunciations simply have to be learned. However, there are a few basic rules that can help.
Firstly, when ‘gh’ is at the beginning of a word, or at the beginning of a stressed syllable, it is always pronounced /g/. Examples of this are ghost, ghastly, ghetto and spaghetti.
Words that end in ‘ought’ have the pronunciation /ɔːt/ in UK English (the sound in the word ‘short’) and /ɑːt/ in US English (the vowel sound as in the first syllable of ‘father’). Examples are thought, fought, bought, brought and ought.
Words containing the letters ‘igh’ have the pronunciation /aɪ/ (the sound in ‘white’ and ‘nine’). This is the same for UK and US pronunciation. Examples are tight, high, sigh, bright, fortnight and delighted.
The combination ‘eigh’ is pronounced /eɪ/ (the sound in ‘wait’ or ‘hate’), for example in eight, weight and neighbour. The only exception to this (among commonly used words) is height, which is pronounced /haɪt/ (and rhymes with ‘white’). This is a great example of the difficulty of English pronunciation – why should weight and height, two words with similar spellings and describing similar concepts, have different pronunciations? The answer is almost certainly to do with the word origins, but that doesn’t help our poor students!
The usual pronunciation for ‘augh’ is /ɔː/ (UK) /ɑː/ (US). This is the case for words such as caught, taught, daughter, and distraught. However, the words draught(y) (UK spelling) and laugh(ter) have the sound /ɑːf/ (UK) /æf/ (US).
Strangely, there is only one common word that contains the letters ‘aigh’, and that is straight (along with the other members of its family such as straighten and straightforward). The sound here is /eɪ/ for UK and US English.
Finally, I will go back to that tricky combination ‘ough’. I have already dealt with ‘ought’ words above, but there are at least 7 other ways of pronouncing this combination, and I’m afraid they simply have to be learned, so here they are:
/əʊ/ (UK) /oʊ/ (US): although, dough, though.
/uː/ through
/ɒf/ (UK) /ɑːf/ (US) trough, cough
/ʌf/ enough, rough, tough
/ə/ (UK) /oʊ/ (US) thorough, borough
I will end with the weirdest one of all: hiccough, which is pronounced /ˈhɪk.ʌp/ (the sound ‘up’ at the end). Nowadays, we often spell it ‘hiccup’, but you do still see it written with the -ough spelling.
Do let me know if you come across any ‘gh’ pronunciations I’ve missed, and don’t forget, there are audio recordings on all the words in the dictionary on this site.
When it says “…but there are at least 7 other ways of pronouncing this combination”, it should be “6 other ways”, shouldn’t it?
How about Keighley, the town in West Yorkshire, where it’s pronounced ‘th’?
Ah yes, good one. I suspect that if we include proper nouns, there could be even more!
No, the 7th is ‘hiccough’.
Dear Liz, many thanks, clear and most helpful. Would be nice to also have a clue on pronouncing names of places and people. Or at least some indications. As a non native English-speaker I struggle a lot! thanks you in advance.
I’ll have a think about that! Place names are really hard to pronounce. The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary has a pretty comprehensive coverage of place names.
Ugh! Do not go there. This has been resolved, once and for all, with “Hiccup”! This is fantastically easy to fix by squashing the stupid original pronunciation with nothing less than torture for children and adults learning english all over the world.
That’s correct, I’m sorry
No worries at all! Readers definitely have spotted mistakes in my posts before, so I was just relieved to find that wasn’t one of them!
Thank you, Liz! Your article is awesome and very helpful.
Thank you for imparting your wisdom on us and for inspiring us to do our best.
Thank you, Liz!!! A very interesting article, indeed! I teach History of the English Language at a university in San Juan, Argentina. After reading your article, I feel like tracing back all these words’ etymologies to see what I can find out.
Mariela
I’d like to read what you find out!
I’m a lifelong AmE speaker (who was also an English instructor). Never have I heard “father” pronounced so as to rhyme with words like “ought.” I also don’t pronounce it that way: the standard AmE pronunciation is “FAH-ther, whereas “ought” is “awt.”
That’s interesting – I just went to the dictionary entry for ‘thought’ to check – the US voice there certainly pronounces the vowel as /ɑː/. Maybe it’s a regional thing?
Hi, I´d like to know about the silent pronunciation of “gh” in words such as Edinborough, Brannagh, Kavannaugh, Hugh, and many others…
Some of these words have roots in Gaelic. Gaelic had its own alphabet until the 20th century. In particular, there was an accent (a dot) on top of some letters (which indicated the correct pronunciation), which was replaced with a “h” following the letter. [for example, ċ in gaelic type becomes ch in Roman type].
This now causes a lot of confusion, particularly with Gaelic personal names and place names that transferred directly to English. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography#Followed_by_bh,_dh,_gh,_mh for more details.
So, the difference between ‘laugh’ and ‘cough’ is just that the vowel sound is slightly longer in ‘laugh’. Is that right?
Not really – they are different vowels. Remember you can listen to sound recordings of all the words in the Cambridge Dictionary on this site – for British and American English. That will probably help to explain the differences.
It will more be helpful if you make a video
Reblogged this on Site Title.
There is one interesting word in English which could be pronounced two ways. It’s the word SLOUGH. If we mean a marsh or a swamp, we pronounce it as [slˈʌf]. But if we mean A LOT OF… we will pronounce it like SLEW [slˈuː].
Thanks Sergio, very interesting. And weird…
The word “slew “ – spelled s-l-e-w – means a lot of something. It is not spelled s-l-o-u-g-h.
It’s true only for American English because they like to simplify. In British English rules my rule(pardon me for double rule, oops, now triple).
Thank you, Ms Walter! As a native English speaker (San Francisco, CA) now teaching beginning English to adults, as well as “semi-fluent” university students in France, this is a particular topic I have difficulty explaining so clearly. Not to mention they think I am copping out when I say “some things have no logic, we just have to pay attention, and memorize.” I look forward to reading more of your posts!
English spelling is a bit easier than oriental logograms but not much. I can’t uderstand why English speaking people don’t demand a reform of it. G. B. Shaw left some money for this purpose. Where is it?
Ps: thanks for the excellent explanation
I’m a native AmE speaker who lived in the U.K. for several years and I still work as a content editor for a U.K. company (hence fairly “fluent” in British English as well). When I taught English (to native AmE students) years ago I enjoyed twisting their brains a bit by writing “ghoti” on the board and stating that it could be an alternative spelling of “fish”. You just need the “gh” sound from “rough”, the “o” sound from “women”, and the “ti” sound from “nation”. 😉
Thank you for the great review of ‘gh’ pronunciation in English!
Not too long ago I encountered a nice “remembering sentence” for this specific topic:
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.
Wow, top marks for anyone who gets that right!
How about the pronoucation of “through” as “Throo”
Yes, that’s on the list of 7 other ways to pronounce ‘ough’!
Excellent article … I loved it.
Excellent comments as well. Should the silent gh … be treated as eighth variation???
I wish to read all of your articles and posts .please help me with links to educate myself . Thanks
There is another pronunciation that is unique to one word, as far as I know. A friend of mine used the word “trough” and pronounced it as “troth”! I said to him, “Are you saying “troth”?? He said he was and I proceeded to try to explain his {strange} error. Subsequently, for confirmation, I looked it up. Webster’s gives “troth” as the second pronunciation!! So bizarre! It also gave “tro”, sometimes used by bakers! So you can add “th” to your list!
Goodness, that’s amazing! I have never heard that one before! Thanks for sharing.
Keighley, pronounced Keeth-lee, a town in Yorkshire, England.
Yes, good one!
A hiccough is a “hic” sounding cough. It isn’t really a cough of course but what else comes closer? It isn’t a swallow, gulp, belch, sneeze or blow. The “f” sound in cough somehow deteriorated to a “p” sound probably because of the sound produced by the spasm. The cure is to reset the epiglottis rhythm.
I have been scratching my head about this since morning … I’m trying to find all vowel and consonant combinations and explain them in my mother-tongue so it can help some people to understand English spellings rules . Thank God I found this … Bless you ..
Hello!
Someone told me once, that there is an variation in the US of pronouncing the ‘gh’ as in “enough” or “tough” the same way as ‘th’ as it is pronounced in words like “think” or “both”.
Is there truly such a variation?
Thank you very much
I have never heard of this, but Sam Swayze’s comment above suggests it may be possible.