Spelling test: 20 commonly misspelled English words (free)

How this spelling test works

Each line is a short sentence with a gap. Next to the gap you see the first letter of the word and how many letters it has. Type the word, leave a field empty if you do not know it, and press the check button when you are done. An empty field counts as a miss. Capital letters and spaces around the word do not matter.

The words come from a list of 150 that people often spell wrong. The first round is always the same twenty, so you can come back next week and compare your result with today's. After checking, the button for the next twenty words gives you a fresh round, in a fixed order as well. The list runs through seven rounds before it starts again.

Why these words trip people up

Most of the 150 words fall into a few groups. Some have a double letter in a spot where you hear only one sound, such as accommodate, committee and necessary. Some have a silent letter that you only know from seeing the word, like the k in knowledge, the b in subtle and the d in Wednesday. Some borrow their spelling from another language, which is why restaurant, rhythm and yacht look the way they do. And some are plain exceptions to a rule you know, like weird and foreign.

Three spelling rules that cover many of them

The first is the old one: i before e, except after c. It gets you believe, fierce and receive. It does not cover weird, leisure or foreign, so treat those as words to learn one at a time.

The second is about endings. When a word ends in a stressed vowel and a single consonant and you add -ed or -ing, you double the consonant: refer becomes referred, begin becomes beginning. When the stress falls earlier, you do not.

The third is about the silent e. Keep it before a suffix that starts with a consonant, as in completely, sincerely and achievement. Two words break this rule, argument and truly, so learn them as they are. And keep it in noticeable and changeable, where the e makes the c and the g sound soft.

What to do with a word you missed

After checking, the words you missed come with a one-line tip. Pick the two or three that surprised you and write each one out three times from memory, without looking. Try the round again a few days later. Because the list is fixed, a better result next time means you learned those words.

What this test is, and what it is not

It is a quick check of how you spell a set of common words. It is not a test of how well you write, and a few misses say nothing about that. We give you a count out of twenty and no comparison with other people, because there is nothing behind such a comparison yet.

Next steps

If you want to know whether you recognise a word rather than spell it, take the vocabulary test, forty words with ten made-up ones. For timed games, the brain games page has five of them on one page.