Sight words: the Dolch and Fry lists

How it works

1. Find the level you are teaching in the lists below — every word is printed on the page.
2. Pick an activity for that level: word search, spelling, flashcards, bingo or tracing.
3. The generator opens with the words already loaded — adjust anything, then download the PDF.

Using these worksheets in teaching

Sight words are worth teaching, and they are also the part of early reading most often taught badly. The failure mode is treating all 220 as pure memorization: most of them are perfectly decodable once the relevant letter-sound patterns are known, and drilling them as shapes teaches children to guess from the first letter — a habit that shows up two years later as fluent-sounding reading with the meaning quietly wrong. Teach the irregular ones (said, was, one, they, of) as words to be known, and let the regular ones (and, can, up, big) come through ordinary decoding at speed. Keep the practice short and mixed: five minutes of flashcards out of order beats twenty minutes down a list, because a list can be recited. Above all, get the words back into sentences quickly — a word known in isolation and not recognized in a book has not really been learned, and the whole point of automatic recognition is the attention it frees up for what the sentence is actually saying.

Frequently asked questions

What are sight words?

High-frequency words that a child is taught to recognize instantly rather than sound out — partly because they appear constantly, and partly because many of them (said, one, they, were) do not follow the usual letter-sound patterns. Around a hundred words account for roughly half of everything written in English, so instant recognition of that handful frees up all the attention a child has for the words that carry the meaning.

What is the difference between the Dolch and Fry lists?

Edward Dolch compiled his list in 1936 from children's books of the time: 220 "service" words graded across five levels from pre-primer to third grade, plus 95 nouns. Edward Fry's list came from 1950s–1980s reading material and is ordered purely by frequency in hundreds, no grading. They overlap heavily — the Fry first 100 is largely the Dolch service words reordered — so use whichever your school already uses rather than teaching both.

Which level should a child start on?

Pre-primer, and move on only when the whole level is read instantly, not sounded out. The levels are cumulative in practice: a child stuck at first grade is usually still hesitating over a handful of primer words. Test by reading the list aloud out of order — reciting a list in the order it was learnt is a common and misleading kind of success.

Are these lists copyrighted?

No. Both lists were published in the United States before 1964 without renewal and are in the public domain, which is why they can be printed here in full and loaded straight into the generators.

Why do the practise links open a different tool for each activity?

Because there is no single "sight words worksheet" worth making — the words are input, and what matters is the activity. Each link carries that level's words into the tool built for the job, already filled in, so you land on a live preview rather than an empty form. Where a tool caps its list length, the link says how many words it carries.

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