Art > Word Garden

The order of closing consonants follows the sonority scale, from least to most vowellike as we move from left to right. The second quadrant completes the large yellow field of fricatives. Nasal sounds, shown in green, tend to be heard as fused with preceding vowels. L gets even trickier, and R sounds are so vowellike they tend to wreak havoc on both sound and spelling. Because this is the territory of short vowel sounds, the final column of words ending in open vowels is mostly barren.