“Sight Words” Explained

Have you heard your child or your child’s teacher mention a “sight word”? Or depending on the reading curriculum, maybe a high-frequency word, tricky word, trick word, heart word, snap word, popcorn word, red word, rule breaker or memory word?

It seems that for every different reading program, there is different terminology to describe what are most commonly called “sight words.” However, regardless of label, most of the terms aim to identify the same characteristics that these very words behold and make them unique.

Sound confusing? To those of us born before the 2000s, it makes a lot of sense that none of these terms sound familiar from our own schooling. And that is because most schools used to teach the “whole-language” method of recognizing words as visual patterns rather than sounding them out.

So to Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millenials and even some Gen Z, whole-language predominated, and, essentially all words to us were taught as sight words because systematic phonics programs, which emphasize sounding out words, did not begin to take off until the early 21st century.

This historic background is important because the term “sight word” (and all of the other similar terminology) now means something greatly different and much more specific. Gen Alpha, born 2013-2025, and current ages 1-13, is the first generation to learn to read with explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

This means that children are currently taught to read by sounding all words out. They are taught phonics rules (i.e. vowel teams, digraphs) to apply directly to decoding words. So, they are not taught to memorize whole words or recognize words by sight, with two exceptions:

 1) irregular words, and

2) high-frequency words

Irregular words cannot be fully sounded out using regular phonics rules. They can often be partially but not fully sounded out as in the word “the,” which contains the regular digraph “th” sound but does not follow the regular phonics rules for the sound that the “e” would typically make at the end of a word. Other common irregular words include was, said, one, does, come, have.

High-frequency are the words that are most commonly seen in print, such as and, it, in, on. But here’s the interesting thing; sometimes high-frequency words are also irregular words as in the case of “the” or “you.” It’s these specify words--words that are both the highest in frequency AND irregular that most current-day phonics programs spend the most time teaching as sight words.

The overall goal in teaching “sight words” today is to increase reading fluency. The idea is that allowing a child to recognize words automatically frees up their brain from having to spend the energy to decode every word, and instead, to focus on the overall goal of reading; comprehension.

It’s estimated that between 40-50% of words used in children’s books are considered to be sight words? So are these words important? Absolutely. Can parents practice these words at home with their kids to increase fluency and overall reading enjoyment? Yes. Is there one agreed upon list you can find to practice these words either by reading through a list or writing out on flashcards? Unfortunately, no, but here are some suggestions:

 1)    Connect with your child’s teacher and ask for a list of sight words taught this year. For instance, my children’s school uses the Fundations program, and so I can ask for a list of the second grade Fundations sight words my daughter has been taught. As I know from teaching this program for years, Fundations calls them “trick words!”

2)    Fry Sight Word List. One of the two most popular sight sword lists that includes 1,000 high-frequency words listed from 1-1,000 in terms of frequency. I don’t love that this list is from 1957, though it was updated in the 1980s.

3)    Dolch Sight Word List. The other most popular sight word list of the most commonly used words with slightly more focus on irregular words. Again, I don’t love that this is from 1948, and therefore reflects words most commonly used in texts from decades ago.

4)    The Booktrition Top 100 Word List. As I developed Booktrition, I cataloged the most commonly used words in current books recommended from kindergarten through early second grade. Using the word data from the recommended books, 21,672 words were totaled. And astonishingly, the top 100 words account for 57% of all text in children’s books.