The words

Tap any word to hear it. 67 of these 100 words are in the app, where each has its own sentence.

Fry words 1 to 25

Two versions of the first hundred circulate. This is the one published by the Utah Education Network and California State University San Bernardino. Some reproductions print words for word, called for call, and swap oil and over for am and its.

Fry words 26 to 50

Fry words 51 to 75

Fry words 76 to 100

Fry's list runs to 1,000 words in ten hundreds. Only the first hundred is printed here, because that is the band a child in kindergarten through second grade is working on. The later hundreds move into content words such as sound, place, animal and mountain.

Where the Fry list comes from

Edward Fry's 1,000 Instant Words are published as the most common words for teaching reading, writing and spelling, and they are the modern alternative to Dolch. The difference is the ordering principle. Dolch sorted his words into five difficulty levels; Fry ranked his by frequency in print and grouped them in hundreds, so the first hundred are literally the hundred commonest words in English text. The University of Florida Literacy Institute defines high-frequency words as a small group of roughly 300 to 500 words that account for a large share of printed words, and names Dolch and Fry as the two standard lists. Schools generally pick one and stay with it.

Five minutes a day at home

Do not start at word one and work down. Test a band of twenty-five, find the words that are missing, and work on three to five of those at a time. Show a card, say the word, have your child say it, spell it aloud, then say it whole. Shuffle, repeat, and call a word learned when it comes back in about a second. Begin each session by rereading the words from last time. Because Fry's list is a frequency ranking, the payoff is concentrated at the top: the first twenty-five words alone appear constantly, so securing them is worth far more than a scattered pass across the hundred.

How this fits with phonics

Fry sorted by frequency, not by spelling, so the first hundred mixes very regular words with awkward ones. Get, him, not, did, up and can are sounding out practice. The, was, said, one, of, who and word are the ones worth teaching by heart, and even then only the odd letters need memorizing. The Texas Education Agency makes a point worth passing on: it warns teachers not to label high-frequency words non-decodable or irregular as a class, because many of them contain perfectly common spelling patterns. Treat the list as a priority order for practice and keep the phonics teaching separate and intact.

Practice tips

  • Secure the first twenty-five before touching the rest. They appear more often than everything below them.
  • Test a band of twenty-five to find gaps rather than teaching the words in order.
  • Name the awkward letters in was, said, one and of instead of calling the whole word irregular.
  • Work three to five words per session and start each session by rereading the last set.
  • If school uses Dolch, do not run both lists. They overlap heavily and two lists doubles the bookkeeping for no gain.

Related lists

  • Dolch sight words: The Dolch list is 220 service words in five levels, plus a separate list of 95 nouns, so 315 words in total.
  • First 100 Fry words: The first hundred Fry Instant Words are the top band of Fry's ranked high-frequency list, printed in order from the, of, and and a downward.
  • High-frequency words: High-frequency words are the small group of words, usually put at 300 to 500, that account for a large share of everything in print.

Sources