Snellen chart H, K, O, S, 3, U, Y, A, C, E, G, L, 2. The normal Snellen chart is printed with eleven lines of block letters. The first line consists of one very large letter, which may be one of several letters, for example E, H, or N. Subsequent rows have increasing numbers of letters that decrease in size. A person taking the test covers one eye from 6 metres or 20 feet away, and reads aloud the letters of each row, beginning at the top. The smallest row that can be read accurately indicates the visual acuity in that specific
Three letter rule Three letter rule In English spelling, the three letter rule (or short word rule) is the observation that one- and two-letter words tend to be function words such as "I", "at", "he", "if", "of", "or", etc. As a consequence of the rule, "content words" tend to have at least three letters. In particular, content words containing fewer than three phonemes may be augmented with letters which are phonetically redundant, such as "ebb, "add, "egg, "inn, "bee, "awe, "buy", "owe", etc. Many content words would be homographs of common function words if not for the latter's "redundant" letters: e.g. "be/bee", "in/inn",