Exercise on the difference between orthography and Phonetics (or between speech sounds and letters) A. In each group of three, circle the word with the oddball initial speech sound; e.g., for people, physics, pistol, the word with the initial sound that does not match the other two words is physics; that is, while all three words start with the letter ‘p’, only people and pistol start with a ‘p’ sound (physics, despite the spelling, starts with an ‘f’ – the same sound that begins the words feel and fit). The idea in all of these is to pay attention to the sounds, not the letters.