eli5 What is the word for a vowel and a consonant?

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What I mean is, if I were to make a list of them, what would I name the list?
What’s a word for both of them?
Sorry if this is silly but I have trouble looking stuff like this up. Thanks for your time!
Edit: Thanks everyone! I think the word I was looking for was “phoneme”.
Sorry, I probably didn’t ask this clearly enough I was trying to find the word for the types of letters.

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You may be thinking of syllables. These are vowel sounds with consonant sounds either before, after, or both and are the building blocks of speech.

I’m not aware of a specific term for syllables that are written in English as a single vowel and a single consonant. It wouldn’t be a very useful category, because many syllables are written with more than two letters, and not necessarily because they’re more complex. English spelling is just weird.

For example, “though” is a single syllable written with 2 vowels and 4 consonants. But if you change the consonant sound from “th” to “g”, you’re down to 2 letters with “go”.

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