Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A method of teaching elementary reading and spelling based on the phonetic interpretation of ordinary spelling.
  • noun Phonetics.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The doctrine or science of sounds, especially those of the human voice; phonetics.
  • noun The art of combining musical sounds.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun same as phonetics.
  • noun a method of teaching reading and spelling to beginning students, emphasizing the sound values of individual letters and syllables, and the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. Contrasted to whole language method and sentence method.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The study of how the sounds of words are represented by spelling.
  • noun A method of teaching elementary reading based on the phonetic interpretation of normal spelling.
  • noun Phonetics.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun teaching reading by training beginners to associate letters with their sound values

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From phon- + -ics.

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