Lesson · Spelling to Sound · Endings said one way

-tion, -sion and -ture

A word that ends in tion is said with shun, a word that ends in ture is said with chur, and a word that ends in cial or tial is said with shul. Sion has two sounds, and the letter before it chooses. Each rule is right on 95% or more of the words it can be tried on, and the misses are few enough to name.

Open the interactive lesson Practice

tion says shun 123 of 127 sion says zhun or shun 24 of 25 ture says chur 19 of 20 cial and tial say shul 12 of 12 nation, vision, picture, special

Counted on the 2,800 words

Core ideas

What this lesson establishes

Three ideas.

The letters of the ending are not the sounds

The ending tion has four letters and is said as sh followed by a weak un. No t is said. A student who reads the letters one by one will say nation in the wrong way. A student who learns the ending as a whole will say it in the right way.

Sion has two sounds, and the letter before it chooses

After a vowel letter, sion is said zhun, as in vision. After a consonant it is said shun, as in tension. The rule is a single glance at the letter before the ending.

Few misses is not the same as no misses

The rules here are right 95.0% to 100.0% of the time. The misses are real words you will say, and each one has a reason that fits in a sentence. Learn the reasons and the rules are close to complete.

The material

The six words that break a rule

There are four misses for tion, one for sion, one for ture and none for the last rule.

Many words in English end in the same few groups of letters, and each group is said one way. A student who knows the four in this lesson can say hundreds of words.

The table scores each ending on the words in the list that have it, and prints the words it gets wrong.

The longest group: 127 words

There are 127 words in the list that end in tion. The rule says shun, and it is right on 123 of them, which is 96.9%. Nation, station, action and attention are among them.

The four that do not follow it are equation, intention, question and suggestion. Question and suggestion have an s before the t, and the dictionary, a book that records how words are said, gives them the sound at the start of church. Equation has zhun. For intention the dictionary's first entry has the same church sound, and you may say it another way. Trust your ear for that one: the table reports what the dictionary says.

Two sounds in 25 words

The 25 words ending in sion split in two. After a vowel letter the ending is zhun: conclusion, confusion, decision, division, occasion, provision, television and vision. After a consonant it is shun, as in tension, mission, session and permission.

That rule is right on 24 of 25, which is 96.0%. The one miss is version, which has an r before the ending and is said with zhun. American speech does the same after r in conversion, outside the list, and British speech says shun in both. The rule is one glance at the letter before the ending, and you learn one word.

Twenty words, one miss

The 20 words that end in ture are said with chur, apart from one. That gives 19 of 20, which is 95.0%. Nature, picture, future, culture and temperature follow it. Mature does not. Its last part is the strong one, said harder than the rest, so its vowel keeps a full sound and the table prints the ending as choor. In the other 19 the ending is weak. The next course, Word Stress, is about which part is strong.

Twelve words, no misses

Twelve words end in cial or tial, among them social, special, official, essential and potential. All twelve are said with shul, so the score is 12 of 12, or 100.0%. Three of the eight words set aside in the first lesson, financial, official and racial, are in this list, and the c in each is said as sh.

What the four rules share

None of these endings is said the way its letters read. Each is said as a unit, and the unit is the same in every word. That is a smaller problem than it looks: you learn four sounds, name six words that break a rule, and you can say a long list of words you have never heard.

Interactive

A spelling rule against the dictionary

Each rule reads only the letters; the dictionary says what is actually said

the rule—

words scored—

the rule is right—

share right—

wrong—

the words it gets wrong—

set aside—

different sounds—

Where the sounds come from

Every sound, part count and strong part here is read from the first pronunciation in CMUdict, the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, which records American speech. Its licence asks that this notice travel with anything made from it:

Copyright (C) 1993-2015 Carnegie Mellon University. All rights reserved.

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   The contents of this file are deemed to be source code.

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This work was supported in part by funding from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the National
Science Foundation of the United States of America, and by member
companies of the Carnegie Mellon Sphinx Speech Consortium. We acknowledge
the contributions of many volunteers to the expansion and improvement of
this dictionary.

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Method

Saying a word with one of these endings

Four steps.

Find the ending

Look at the last four or five letters: tion, sion, ture, cial or tial.

Use the fixed sound for three of the endings

Tion is shun, ture is chur, and cial and tial are shul.

For the fourth ending, look at the letter before it

A vowel letter gives zhun. A consonant gives shun.

Then check the short list of words that break a rule

Question, suggestion, equation, intention, version and mature are the six.

Check yourself

Score 0 / 0

Choose the answer you can justify.

Nine words, four endings

Read each word out loud, then check the ending against the rule.

nation, station tion: shun decision, vision sion after a vowel: zhun tension sion after a consonant: shun nature, picture ture: chur social, special cial: shul

Every word here follows its rule. The misses are in the table: question and suggestion are said with the sound at the start of church, and equation with zhun. Version is said with zhun where the rule expects shun, and mature ends in a different sound from chur.

Common mistakes

Saying the longest ending as it is speltThe ending is not t, i, on. It is shun, in 123 of 127 words. Of the four others, question, suggestion and intention are given with the sound at the start of church by the dictionary, and equation with zhun.

Using one sound for the fourth endingVision and tension look the same and end differently. The letter before sion chooses, and the rule is right on 24 of 25 words.

Thinking a miss means the rule is wrongVersion and mature are one miss each, in lists of 25 and 20. A rule that is right 96.0% or 95.0% of the time is worth keeping, with the word beside it.

Check your understanding

✓

Finish when you can say a word that ends in one of four common endings from its spelling, and name the words that break the rule.

You should be able to say each ending, choose between the two sounds of sion by the letter before it, read the score of each rule off the table, and name the misses.

Note: Two of the four misses for tion, question and suggestion, have an s in front of the ending. After s, tion is said chun, and digestion, outside the list, does the same. That is the lesson of the earlier pages again: sort the misses, and a reason appears.