Lesson 14: Braille Groupsigns — Reading Common Letter Groups
Watch Lesson 14: Braille Groupsigns — Reading Common Letter Groups
Watch the guided demonstration, pause to practise, then continue with the written lesson and exercises below.
Consider shop and ship. The first two print letters are the same: sh. In contracted Unified English Braille (UEB), those letters can be represented together by one cell, ⠩. The remaining letters still tell you which word you are reading:
- shop — ⠩⠕⠏
- ship — ⠩⠊⠏
In Lesson 13, you learned one-cell contractions for whole words. Here the task changes: recognize groupsigns within a larger word. A groupsign represents a particular sequence of print letters. It does not necessarily match one spoken sound, and it is not an instruction to remove word boundaries.
Six groups you can recognize inside words
These six are common strong groupsigns from the UEB code. The letters and dot numbers matter more than the apparent outline of the Unicode character.
| Print letter group | UEB groupsign | Raised dots | Example built using that sign |
|---|---|---|---|
| ch | ⠡ | 1-6 | chop → ⠡⠕⠏ |
| sh | ⠩ | 1-4-6 | ship → ⠩⠊⠏ |
| th | ⠹ | 1-4-5-6 | thin → ⠹⠊⠝ |
| wh | ⠱ | 1-5-6 | when → ⠱⠑⠝ |
| ou | ⠳ | 1-2-5-6 | loud → ⠇⠳⠙ |
| st | ⠌ | 3-4 | step → ⠌⠑⠏ |
The exercise spellings use the six groups taught on this page, keeping other letter sequences uncontracted so you can isolate the new skill. Fully contracted UEB may apply additional contractions in some of these words.
Do not mix up the and th
The whole word the was ⠮ in Lesson 13. The letter group th is ⠹ here. They are different cells:
| Meaning in these exercises | Cell | Raised dots |
|---|---|---|
| the (complete word) | ⠮ | 2-3-4-6 |
| th (two letters in a word) | ⠹ | 1-4-5-6 |
For example, thin begins with ⠹, not ⠮. It does not begin with the complete word the.
Follow the cells through a word
Try the word loud, shown as ⠇⠳⠙.
- ⠇ is the letter l.
- ⠳ represents the pair ou.
- ⠙ is the letter d.
That is three Braille cells for four print letters. Nothing has been dropped from the spelling; two letters share one cell.
For step, ⠌⠑⠏, read st-e-p. This is why counting Braille cells will no longer reliably tell you how many letters a contracted word contains.
A sign’s meaning depends on its place
You may recognize ⠡ at the start of chop. Inside that word it means ch. The same cell used alone as a word can mean child in contracted UEB. Similarly, the standalone ⠩ can mean shall, and ⠌ used as a word can mean still.
These additional whole-word meanings are not today’s memorization target. The immediate lesson is to read the surrounding cells and word boundaries before deciding what a sign represents. UEB also has a specific safeguard: where a groupsign such as st would make a short abbreviation look like a wordsign, its letters are written separately. For example, St. as an abbreviation is written ⠠⠎⠞⠲, not with ⠌. That is a context rule, not an exception to the dot pattern itself.
Decode six unfamiliar words
Without consulting the chart, read each sequence into an ordinary print word. The two-letter groups appear at different positions.
- ⠡⠊⠝
- ⠩⠑⠙
- ⠹⠕⠗⠝
- ⠱⠁⠞
- ⠗⠳⠝⠙
- ⠍⠊⠌
Reveal the six decoded words
- chin — ch + i + n.
- shed — sh + e + d.
- thorn — th + o + r + n.
- what — wh + a + t.
- round — r + ou + n + d.
- mist — m + i + st.
In mist, the groupsign comes at the end, not the beginning. In round, it sits inside the word.
Write the groups, then the remaining letters
Each answer below should contain one of the six groupsigns taught today. Do not insert other contractions that we have not practiced.
| Print word | Groupsign to use | Your Braille |
|---|---|---|
| chill | ch | __________ |
| shell | sh | __________ |
| thumb | th | __________ |
| whip | wh | __________ |
| cloud | ou | __________ |
| nest | st | __________ |
Check the six written answers
- chill — ⠡⠊⠇⠇
- shell — ⠩⠑⠇⠇
- thumb — ⠹⠥⠍⠃
- whip — ⠱⠊⠏
- cloud — ⠉⠇⠳⠙
- nest — ⠝⠑⠌
For cloud, one ⠳ stands for ou; for nest, one ⠌ stands for the last two letters. Those two are useful checks that a groupsign need not begin a word.
Explain, don’t just guess
Someone reads ⠹⠊⠝ as thein. What went wrong? They gave ⠹, a two-letter th groupsign, the meaning of a different cell, ⠮ for the complete word the. The correct reading is thin. If you can explain the mistaken cell and its dots, you are learning a reading rule rather than memorizing an answer.
Use the BrailleDot translator to examine additional words once you have tried building them yourself. Different longer words may involve more UEB contractions than the selected six on this page; check the source rule before treating a partly contracted practice spelling as a complete contracted transcription.
The next lesson introduces shortform words, which use a sequence of familiar letter cells to represent a much longer word.
UEB source: International Council on English Braille, Rules of Unified English Braille, Sections 10.2 and 10.4.
Written by Marcus Wren.