Irregular Words

Approach to the reading and spelling of irregularly spelled words, in accordance with the syllable types of English, the spelling rules within them and New Zealand pronunciation.

These lists contain words with irregular sounds taken from the ‘Fry’ list, which was developed by Dr Edward Fry. 

The Fry list is based on the most common words that appear in reading materials. The lists in this document also contain words with irregular sounds that are in the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) Essential Word lists. These words appear in pink-coloured text. The high-frequency irregular words are words that appear often in the English language and may not follow the rules of phonology. This means we cannot always sound out all parts of the word to help us decode (read) or encode (spell) them.

Many children with specific learning differences struggle to orthographically map these words, and they may require exponentially more exposures to these words before they can automatically recognise them when reading and automatically recall them for spelling during writing tasks.

This list comes with guidelines on the teaching of these, based on David Kilpatrick’s research.

This list contains over 550 words and testing templates.

*Please note, this digital file is an open license. Once downloaded you may print multiple copies.