Color Vowel® Chart

What is the Color Vowel Chart?

The Color Vowel® Chart is a visual organizer for the prosody that characterizes spoken English. Each color represents a vowel sound.

For example, GREEN is the high front vowel /iy/, as found in the words “tree” and “teacher”. Similarly, BLUE represents the high back vowel /uw/, as found in the words “clue” and “student.” In this way, each color word serves both as a key word and a visual cue for a specific stressed vowel sound. Explore our audio-interactive Color Vowel™ Chart to hear each sound.

“One of my favorite things about the Color Vowel™ Chart is the way that it visually brings attention to the differences among the English vowels– differences that students may not be able to hear.  –-Jody Gabler, ESL Instructor (New York)

How Does Color Vowel™ Work?

The Color Vowel™ Chart represents the vowel sounds of North American English. Each color in the Color Vowel™ Chart represents a single vowel sound.

Each sound has a color name (such as GREEN) and a key word (such as TEA). The corresponding vowel sound is featured in both words.

While the Color Vowel™ Chart appears simply to depict individual vowel sounds, it does much more than that.

The Chart enables us to identify each English word or phrase based on the pronunciation of its primary stressed syllable, and this– knowing where the stress is and what vowel sound lies at the heart of that stressed syllables– is perhaps the biggest single predictor for speaking comprehensibly, listening effectively, and reading fluently in English.

Here, it is important to focus on a fundamental rule of spoken English: each word has exactly one primary stressed syllable, and at the nucleus of that syllable is a vowel sound. Using the Color Vowel™ Chart to assign a color to that vowel sound, we can say that each word has exactly one color.

• One-syllable words contain one vowel sound (even if a word contains more than one vowel letter). For example:soup is BLUE, bread is RED, and knife is WHITE.
• In multi-syllable words, only one syllable receives primary stress. Stress makes the syllable higher, louder, and longer than the other syllables. For example:electric is RED and electricity is SILVER, while south is BROWN and southern is MUSTARD.
• In phrases, one word will receive the focus stress. For example:See you later is GRAY, Let’s have lunch is MUSTARD, and Nice to meet you is GREEN.

The Color Vowel™ Chart provides teachers and learners with an accessible shorthand for talking about spoken English.  Instead of having to write a phonetic symbol, teachers and students can simply refer to the “color” of the vowel sound in question.

Here’s an example taken from the classroom:

Student: How do you say this word? [pointing to the word “frighten” in a text]

Teacher: “Frighten” [saying the word, using an open hand to signal stress on the first syllable]. So, what color is “frighten”?

Student: [who has already been introduced to the Color Vowel Chart] Um,… white. So… “frighten.”

Teacher: That’s right. “Frighten.”

Student: Frighten, white, white, frighten… [returns to the learning activity]

Because the key words are all related (that is, they are all color words), the student and the teacher have an easy-to-remember reference word for each vowel sound—much easier than memorizing unrelated words or memorizing phonetic symbols.