Glossary entry for "high-frequency words"

The most common words used in written English text. They are sometimes called ‘irregular words’ or ‘sight words’. Many common or high-frequency words in English cannot be decoded using sound–letter correspondence because they do not use regular or common letter patterns. These words need to be learnt by sight (for example, ‘come’, ‘was’, ‘were’, ‘one’, ‘they’, ‘watch’, ‘many’).