What are high-frequency words? #highfrequencywords #trickywords High-frequency words are one of the main types of sight words and are those words which occur most frequently in written material, for example, “and”, “the”, “as” and “it”. They are often words that have little meaning on their own, but they do contribute significantly to the meaning of a sentence as a whole. Some of the high-frequency words can be sounded out using basic phonic rules, for example, “it” is an easy word to read using phonics. However, many of the high-frequency words are not phonically regular and are therefore hard to read in the early stages. Some high frequency words are called tricky words, or sight words. In addition to being difficult to sound out, most of these high frequency words have a rather abstract meaning which is hard to explain to children. It’s easy to learn words like “cat” and “house” because they can easily be related to a real object or a picture, but representing the words “the” or “of” is tricky because there’s no point of reference.