Free tool · UK phonics
Phonics Decoder
Type any word. The tool breaks it down into phonemes (the sounds you say) and lets you hear each sound separately. For Reception, Y1, and any child still building phonics confidence.
Type a word above and click Sound it out.
About this decoder
Phonics teaches children that words are made of phonemes (sounds) which are written using graphemes (letters or letter combinations). To read a word, children blend the phonemes together. To spell a word, they segment it into phonemes.
How this tool works
You type a word. The tool uses pattern-matching against the UK phonics phases (Phase 2 through Phase 5) to identify the most likely phonemes. It shows each phoneme as a tappable card. Click a card to hear the sound; click the whole word to hear it blended.
Important caveat
English is not perfectly regular. Some words are exceptions (the "tricky words" or "common exception words" Y1/Y2 children learn). The decoder works on common patterns but won't always match exactly what a specific phonics scheme teaches in a particular order. Use this as a quick visual reference, not as a replacement for a school's phonics scheme.
The phonemes covered
Phase 2-5 of the UK phonics framework: single letters (s, a, t, p…), digraphs (sh, ch, th, ng, ai, ee, oa, oo…), trigraphs (igh, air, ear, ure…), and split digraphs (a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e, u-e). Around 44 phonemes covering the spellings most commonly taught at KS1.
Privacy
All processing happens in your browser. Sounds use the browser's text-to-speech. Nothing is sent anywhere.