Vowels and the Letter R

With our tools, like Word Mapper and Word List Builder, people frequently ask, "Where's the button for 'ar'?"

Well, we don't have one.

Why?

On this site, we take a speech-to-print approach, first examining the sounds in language and then the spellings used to represent those sounds. In places with rhotic R's, like the USA, Canada, and Ireland, the spelling 'ar' (like in 'car') is really representing two separate sounds. Rhoticity in English is much, much more common than non-rhoticity.

In fact, a lot of what are called 'r-controlled' vowels are combinations of a regular vowel sound, plus the /r/ sound. There's nothing magic going on, just some coarticulation. You can see below that the same vowel spelling and sound can occur whether it's followed by an 'r' or not.

Spelling	With r	Without r
a_e	stare	made
ea	bear	steak
ai	fair	claim
a	Paris	lady
e	very	beta
ee	cheer	keep
e_e	here	these
ea	ear	each
e	hero	he
i	spirit	taxi
o	for	both
o_e	more	hope
oa	board	load
oo	floor	brooch
a	car	fall

Since these are the same sounds and spellings, they don't need to be taught twice. If a student already knows that 'ee' is a way to spell the sound /ē/, then they can read words like 'cheer' and 'deer'. We don't need to separately teach /ē-r/ as a sound. It's redundant.

Ergo, /er/ is two sounds?

However, there is one vowel sound that's written with an 'r' that is its own unique single sound. It can be spelled lots of different ways. These spellings are all vowel digraphs and trigraphs, so each one represents a single sound.

Sound	Spelling	Example
	er	her
	ir	bird
	ur	turn
	or	work
	ar	dollar
	ure	sure
	re	acre
	ear	pearl
	ere	were
	urr	curry
	our	journal
	err	terrain
	irr	squirrel
	orr	worry
	yr	syrup
	ro	iron

Schwhat did you say?

The /er/ sound is sometimes inaccurately referred to as schwa + r. However, a schwa is an unstressed vowel that sounds like /ŭ/, /ĭ/, or /ĕ/, while /er/ is a single sound that is spelled with a digraph or trigraph. There are words that have a schwa followed by an 'r' (see below), and in these cases we should teach students that the sounds are separate.

Actual schwa + r examples
around
separate
career
original
Colorado
Korea

But what about 'ar' and 'or' spellings?

Let's take a moment to examine the issue from a print-to-speech direction. We'll start with the spelling 'ar' and then see the different sounds it could represent. About half the time it represents the sounds /aw/ and /r/.

The rest of the time it represents one of several other pronunciations. We can see the breakdown in the chart below.

Pirate saying, Why did the pirate arrange to start a war in the library over a lost dollar?

Sounds	Example	Occurrence
+	start	50.7%
+	library	23.7%
	dollar	11.6%
+	arrange	9.0%
+	war	5.0%

The spelling 'or' doesn't have as much variety as 'ar', but still only represents /ō-r/ about 60% of the time. For the other 38%, it represents /er/; the last few percent are edge cases, but they include some suprisingly common words.

Pirate saying, Tomorrow, I'll be working at the correct floral shop!

Sounds	Example	Occurrence
+	floral	58.9%
	work	37.6%
+	correct	2.5%
+	tomorrow	1.0%

And the rest of the spellings?

The spellings for 'ir', 'ur', and 'er' are much more consistent in representing the sound /er/. However, even these sometimes represent two separate sounds.

For ir:

Sounds	Example	Occurrence
	girl	74.5%
+	miracle	14.2%
+	virus	11.3%

For ur:

Sounds	Example	Occurrence
	turn	89.0%
+	curious	9.7%
+	guru	1.3%

For er:

Sounds	Example	Occurrence
	never	92.4%
+	errand	4.4%
+	hero	3.2%

Simpler is Better

We won't pretend this is clear cut. There is a lot of variation in different English accents for vowels + /r/ pronunciations. However, by using the framework of separating vowels and the letter 'r' except for /er/, we believe we have a simpler approach that avoids extra complications from creating a category of r-controlled vowels.

* These percentages are based on the count of phoneme-grapheme correspondences across 25,502 words as of April 2023.