Wordman blog • September 2026

Letter Names and Letter Sounds

A child is stuck on the word "bat". You point at the first letter and say — what? "Bee"? Or the sound it actually makes in that word, the short "b" you hear at the start? I hesitated over exactly this, and it is worth being clear about why, because the two things are genuinely different, and mixing them up is an easy way to make blending harder than it needs to be.

A letter has a name and it has a sound, and they are not the same thing

The name is what you would call the letter if you were reciting the alphabet: ay, bee, cee, dee. The sound is what that letter contributes when it is doing its job inside a word: the short "a" you hear at the start of "apple", the clipped "b" at the start of "bat", the hiss of "s". Take the letter h. Its name is "aitch" — nothing in that name resembles the breathy sound h makes in "hat". Or take w: the name is "double-u", but the sound is nothing like "u" at all. Even with letters where the name and sound are close, like m ("em") or s ("ess"), the name carries an extra vowel bolted on that isn't there when the letter is actually working inside a word.

Reading is built from sounds, not names

When a child sounds out "cat", they are not thinking "cee, ay, tee" and then somehow guessing the word. They're producing three sounds in sequence — k, a, t — and gluing them together: c-a-t. That gluing only works if what's being said matches what's actually heard in the word. The letter names don't do that job. "Cee" has a vowel in it that never shows up in "cat". So schools teach the sounds first, before or alongside the names, because the sounds are the actual building blocks a child needs to decode print. The names are a separate, later layer — useful, but not what makes blending work.

Letter names still matter, just not for this

None of this makes letter names pointless. They matter for a different set of jobs. If a child is spelling a word aloud — "that's cat, c-a-t" — they're using names, and that's correct, because spelling aloud is a naming task, not a blending task. Reciting the alphabet uses names. So does alphabetical order — looking a word up in a dictionary, filing something under its first letter, finding your child's name on a register or a coat peg in a line-up of names from A to Z. Names have a real, permanent place. They're just not the tool for turning print into a spoken word.

Why dropping a name into a blend throws a child off

The trouble starts when the two get mixed mid-task. If a child is trying to blend "cat" and someone says "see — a — tee", the blend breaks, because "see" and "tee" carry vowel sounds that aren't part of the word at all — you would end up with something like "see-ay-tee", which doesn't resolve into "cat" no matter how quickly you say it. Blending only works with the pared-down sounds: k, a, t, said close together. A child just about holding a blend together in their head has very little spare capacity — one letter name dropped into the middle of it can be enough to lose the thread entirely and have to start again.

Both sit down together eventually, and that's fine

None of this is a sign that a child is behind or that a parent has been doing it wrong. Adults use both names and sounds fluently without noticing the switch — reading a word by its sounds one moment, spelling it aloud by its names the next. Children get there too, usually without much fuss, once decoding is solid enough that the names stop competing for attention. Early on, some crossed wires are completely normal. If your child says "buh" instead of a clean "b", or asks why h is called "aitch" when it doesn't sound like one, that's not confusion to worry about — it's just a child noticing, correctly, that English has given them two different systems to learn, and getting on with learning both.

If this was useful, the blog has more: the I Spy mistake that started all of this, and five phonics games for the car.