baguette
beguile
dengue
disguise
guarantee
guard
Guernica
guernsey
guess
guest
Guevara
Guiana
guide
guile
guild
guillotine
guilt
guinea
Guinness
guise
guitar
guy
languor
Portuguese
roguish
5 responses to “gu as in guess”
Leave a Reply
The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Isn’t the reason for the u following the g in many words in order to separate the e or i thus keeping the g with a hard sound.
Yes, I think that is the reason for it, but rather than trying to give my clients verbal rules to explain this kind of thing, I just treat it as a spelling alternative sometimes used before the letter “i” and “y” since a letter g before these letters is typically pronounced “j” (but not always, see the last column of this list: http://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/g/g-as-in-got).
some words like language, extinguish, and anguish… has /gw/ sound, it’s not in the list
That’s because they are on this list: https://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/w/u-as-in-quack. The /g/ is spelt normally, it’s just the /w/ sound that has an unusual spelling, though it’s the usual spelling after a velar plosive sound (/k/ or /g/). Hope that makes sense. Alison
is a digraph, not two monographs. This includes when it’s pronounced as /gw/. Some digraphs code for two phonemes. It’s analogous to .
It’s only when followed by a consonant phoneme, e.g. gut, gum, gun, gull, gulp, etc.
See
https://teflpedia.com/%E2%9F%A8gu%E2%9F%A9