Above: The Standard Lexical Sets for English as emoji.

These terms were introduced by John C. Wells and are often used when people talk about specific vowel sounds.

Different English varieties split or merge these distinctions in different ways, for example, the 🕳/🛁 split, and the 💡/🍔 merger.

For more see Lexical Set on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_set

Make your own set!

(via superlinguo)

I’ve put these on the vowel trapezoid, for ease of reference! 

Note that all positions are approximate because the lexical sets (by design) vary across English dialects. 

(via allthingslinguistic)