Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. The phonetic alphabet is called that because each letter/word in the alphabet was chosen to be one that started with the corresponding phoneme and that the set of words were between them phonetically unambiguous. Phonics is a way of teaching reading and writing that is based on the phonetics of words and how they relate to the written form.

Note: This incident is from February 2025, not recent news. This is a repost of one of their top articles of the year. I hadn’t seen it originally, but it should probably be marked in some way as not being current as of time of posting.