say it: FAH-niks
phonics is a noun meaning "teaching reading by training beginners to associate letters with their sound values". It carries one recorded sense.
teaching reading by training beginners to associate letters with their sound values
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for phonics come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.