The Rainbow Passage is one of the most common standard reading passages used to test an individual's ability to produce connected speech. Like the My Grandfather passage it is used in speech evaluations, but it is also used in studying accents, reading comprehension, as a speech exercise, and for testing language recognition software. There are any number of passages that have been designed to give a good representative sample of English sounds, including Arthur the Rat, My Grandfather, and Comma Gets a Cure. The Rainbow Passage may not be the best, but it is the most famous. My Grandfather seems to be a little more common in the fields of voice and speech therapy, but over all Rainbow seems to be the best known reading passage in the English language.

It was designed to contain almost all the English phonemes (it's missing ʒ and the glottal stop). But it includes some fun things that many other reading passages don't, like the syllabic m in 'prism' and the syllabic l in 'Aristotle'.

The Rainbow Passage





Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the drops; the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of a super-imposition of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon the green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green light when mixed form yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue.

While this is a very good reading passage, as such things go, it has been criticized for containing too many difficult vocabulary words. A reading passage isn't any good if the subject can't read it, and words like 'Aristotle' and 'phenomenon' make it hard for children and non-native English speakers to understand and pronounce. It is also very long, so often only the first two paragraphs are used. Many sources don't bother to give the entire passage, but if you are looking for a shorter passage that contains a good number of English phonemes you would do better to use something like My Grandfather rather than cut Rainbow short.

This copy of The Rainbow Passage comes from, which in turn found it in the Voice and Articulation Drillbook by Grant Fairbanks. The Rainbow Passage is pretty well standardized, so this is word for word what you will find in most textbooks.

The Rainbow Passage is a public domain text.

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