AW (saw) Sound Word List
OnTrack Reading Phonics Program
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The /aw/ sound has four spellings, aw (claw), au (sauce), augh (taught), and ough (thought). If a word ends with the /aw/ sound it's spelled with aw, but both the au and aw spellings are used otherwise. The augh and ough spellings are uncommon spellings of the /aw/ sound.
The /aw/ sound is difficult to deal with in a curriculum because in some regions it’s quite distinct from the /o/ sound in hot and in others it’s not. The choice made in the OnTrack Reading curriculum was to force words where /aw/ is spelled with the letter "a" into the /o/ list (hot, want, wall, was) for spelling purposes, while establishing an /aw/ list for the spellings "aw", "au", "augh", and "ough". In regions where there is no distinction between the /o/ and /aw/ sounds, the spellings on this page should be taught as spelling alternatives for the /o/ sound, rather than as a different vowel sound.
Of the 7,000 words in the database constructed from a popular children’s dictionary, 51 of them are one-syllable words in which the vowel sound is /aw/.
