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Why "Laugh" Doesn't Rhyme with "Caught": Cracking -augh and -eigh

If you've spent years memorizing vocabulary, you've probably run into this: words that look alike on paper don't sound alike out loud. Caught and laugh both contain augh, but one rhymes with thought and the other with half. Eight and height both contain eigh, but one says "ay" and the other says "eye". You can look each one up, but the next unfamiliar word leaves you guessing again.

-augh: almost always /ɔː/, with one small exception

Most common words spelled with -augh are pronounced /ɔː/ (the vowel in thought), with the gh completely silent:

The real exception is a tiny cluster: laugh and laughter. Here the gh doesn't disappear — it turns into /f/. Laugh is /lɑːf/ in British English and /læf/ in American; laughter follows the same pattern, /ˈlɑːftə/ and /ˈlæftər/.

So there's no need to memorize a rule for every -augh word. Just remember one thing: default to /ɔː/ — unless the word is laugh or laughter.

-eigh: almost always /eɪ/, with one exception: height

Words spelled with -eigh follow an even tidier pattern:

Nearly all of them use /eɪ/, the same vowel as in day or say. The one common exception is height /haɪt/ — the eigh there isn't "ay" at all, it's "eye", the same vowel as in high or light. Learners who read height for the first time often default to something closer to "hate", when it should actually rhyme with light.

Why the spelling lies: gh used to be a real sound

This isn't English trying to trip you up. Centuries ago, gh represented an actual consonant — a rasping sound made in the back of the throat, similar to the ch in the Scottish word loch. Over time that sound disappeared from most English dialects, but it disappeared differently word by word. In some it vanished cleanly (caught, eight); in others it hardened into /f/ (laugh). The spelling never caught up, and what's left looks like an inconsistent rule. Once you know that, the "irregularity" stops feeling like something you failed to memorize correctly — it's a historical fossil, and fossils don't follow rules.

How to practise: sort by sound, tag the exceptions separately

Instead of drilling every -augh and -eigh word individually, sort them by sound into two groups — the /ɔː/ group (caught, taught, daughter…) and the /eɪ/ group (eight, weight, neighbor…) — and keep laugh/laughter and height as two standalone exception cards. When you hit a new augh or eigh word, guess the majority pattern first, and only add it to your exception list if you guess wrong. That's far less effortful than trying to hold a complete rule in your head from the start.

Not sure which group a new word belongs to? PHONO reads any English text through your camera or from pasted text and marks every word with IPA, so you can see instantly whether the gh is silent — or which sound it's hiding.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/phono-english-phonetics-ipa/id6783243417 · phono.douhouse.com