Glossary of THRASS Terms
 THRASS - Teaching (Handwriting) Reading and Spelling Skills
 Phoneme – speech sound
 Grapheme – spelling choice
 Graph – one letter making one phoneme e.g. giant
 Digraph – two letters making one phoneme e.g. cage
 Trigraph – three letters making one phoneme
 Split digraph – two letters making one vowel phoneme but split by a consonant
graph – kite, note.
 Consonant Blend – two or three consonant phonemes said together when reading,
f-r-o-g
 Hot words – high frequency words or common words e.g. and, the, said
 Vowels – a,e,i,o,u and all the associated spelling choices for the vowel sounds.
There are 20 phoneme boxes in the vowel section
 Consonants – the 21 letters of the alphabet that are not vowels and all the
associated spelling choices for the consonant choices. There are 24 phoneme boxes
within the consonant section.
 A Grapheme Catch All (GCA) – an English grapheme, but not one of the 120 key
graphemes eg said, cough.
 Monosyllable – a word with one vowel phoneme/grapheme e.g. bus, hair.
 Polysyllable – a word with two or more phoneme/grapheme e.g. kitten, teacher.