English Spelling Rules: 12 Rules and 80 Commonly Misspelled Words

Five rules cover most everyday words. Double the final consonant of a short, stressed word before -ed or -ing (stop → stopped). Drop a silent e before a vowel suffix (make → making). Change y to i after a consonant (happy → happier). Add -es after s, sh, ch, x and z (box → boxes). Keep prefixes unchanged (mis + spell = misspell). The table on this page gives twelve rules with their exceptions.

Accommodate, definitely, separate, necessary, receive, occurred, embarrass, environment, government, rhythm, restaurant, Wednesday, believe, beginning and tomorrow appear on almost every list. Most of them have a doubled letter, a silent letter or an unstressed vowel you cannot hear clearly. The table on this page lists 80, each with the usual wrong spelling and a short trick to remember the right one.

Only partly. It works for many words with an “ee” sound: believe, field and piece, and after c, receive, ceiling and deceive. But many common words break it, including weird, seize, either, neither, science, their, foreign and height. Treat the rule as a hint for “ee” words, and learn the exceptions as a short list of their own.

Double it when the word ends in one vowel plus one consonant and the last syllable is stressed, before a suffix that starts with a vowel: stop → stopped, big → bigger, begin → beginning, prefer → preferred. If the stress falls earlier, as in visit, open and happen, do not double. Never double w, x or y: show → showed, fix → fixed.

Drop it before a suffix that starts with a vowel: make → making, hope → hoping, write → writing. Keep it before a suffix that starts with a consonant: hope → hopeful, state → statement. Two exceptions are worth learning: keep it after a soft c or g before -able or -ous (noticeable, courageous), and drop it in argument, truly and wholly.

Silent letters are written but not pronounced. The common patterns are k before n (knife, know), w before r (write, wrong), b after m (climb, thumb), n after m (autumn, column), gh (night, daughter), an initial h in a few words (hour, honest), and t in -sten and -stle (listen, castle). Learn them as groups: one rule covers dozens of words.

After a consonant, change y to i and add -es: city → cities, baby → babies. After a vowel, just add -s: day → days, key → keys. Many words ending in -f or -fe change to -ves (knife → knives, leaf → leaves, wife → wives), but some only add -s: roof → roofs, chief → chiefs, belief → beliefs.

Both are correct. British and Indian English double the final l after a single vowel, whatever the stress: travelled, cancelled, modelling, jewellery. American English usually keeps one l when the last syllable is not stressed: traveled, canceled, modeling, jewelry. Choose one style and keep to it through a whole piece of writing; mixing the two looks careless.

Keep a list of the words you actually misspell, learn the five core rules, and use “look, say, cover, write, check” on your list: look at the word, say it, cover it, write it from memory, then check. Ten minutes a day on your own list fixes most repeated mistakes within a few weeks, far faster than studying general lists.

English borrowed words from Latin, French, Greek, Norse and many other languages and often kept their original spellings. Pronunciation then changed over the centuries while spelling stayed fixed. So one sound can be spelled several ways (to, too, two) and one spelling can stand for several sounds (though, through, tough). The rules still cover most everyday words.

A handful of patterns: -our and -or (colour, color), -ise and -ize (organise, organize), -re and -er (centre, center), a doubled or single l (travelled, traveled), and -ce and -se (licence, license). Indian English mostly follows British spelling. Both systems are correct, and the Duolingo English Test accepts both; what matters is that you use one consistently.

D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y. The trick is that it contains the word “finite”: de + finite + ly. The usual mistake is “definately”, with an a, because the vowel in the middle is unstressed and sounds like “uh”. Thinking of the related word “finite”, where you can clearly hear the i, fixes it for good.

N-E-C-E-S-S-A-R-Y: one c and two s’s. A common memory trick is a shirt with one collar (c) and two sleeves (ss). The usual mistakes are “neccessary” and “necesary”. The same pattern, one c and a double s, appears in necessarily and unnecessary, so learning the trick once fixes the whole word family.

S-E-P-A-R-A-T-E. Remember “there is a rat in separate”: sep-a-rat-e. The common mistake is “seperate”, because the second vowel is unstressed and sounds like e. The related noun “separation” helps too, because there the a is easier to hear. The same spelling is used for the verb (to separate) and the adjective (separate rooms).

Find a smaller word inside the hard one (separate has “a rat”, definitely has “finite”, believe has “lie”). Say the word the way it is spelled (Wed-nes-day, Feb-ru-ary). Use a related word where the vowel is clear (grammar → grammatical). Or make a sentence from the letters: Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move.

Yes. In Fill in the Blanks and Read and Complete you type the missing letters of a word, so one wrong letter loses it, and Listen and Type checks the exact words you type. There is no spell-checker. Spelling is also part of the accuracy your written answers are graded on, so it affects your writing tasks as well.

It’s is short for “it is” or “it has”: it’s raining, it’s been a long day. Its shows possession and has no apostrophe: the dog wagged its tail. To check, try replacing the word with “it is”. If the sentence still makes sense, use the apostrophe; if not, write its.