The Dolch Word List

The Dolch word list is a list of frequently used English words compiled by Edward Dolch from 1936 and was originally published in his book Problems in Reading in 1948. The list contains 220 words that when easily recognised greatly aid reading fluency in English. This list excludes nouns; they are in a separate 95-word list. It is said that 50% and 75% of all words used in schoolbooks, library books, newspapers, and magazines are a part of the Dolch basic sight word vocabulary. Athough some of the words he selected might not always seem as relevant, due to his use of children's books of the era, the list is still considered to be a very useful tool.
Contrary to what you may hear most of the 220 Dolch words are phonetic but there are still 21 words that need to be memorized as sight words:

In most of these sight words, the majority of the word is decodable - there are just one or two letters that don’t say the sounds we would expect them to say. The spellings of these words aren’t completely random.

The full list below is divided according to the grades in which it was intended that children would memorize these words. Here is a PDF of the main list words in an alternative format of eleven groups.

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