Words & WritingGreek → English
Phonics
/ˈfɒnɪks/noun
A way of teaching reading by matching letters to the sounds they stand for.
The Greek roots
φωνή
phōnḗ
sound, voice
Literally: “matters of sound”
Follow a root:φωνή23 words
The story of the word
When phonics first appeared in English in the seventeenth century it meant acoustics, the science of sound at large. The teaching sense grew in the nineteenth century out of arguments about how children should be started on print, and hardened in the twentieth into one side of a long fight with whole-word methods. Both senses run on φωνή, the same word sitting inside telephone, symphony and phoneme.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
phonemephonologytelephonecacophony
In a sentence
The school switched to synthetic phonics and the year-one reading scores moved within a term.