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Fill in the missing letters before time runs out. 5 words, increasing difficulty.

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Latest Articles

America Reads, But Does It Read Everyone?

Britain is pushing something called a National Year of Reading, and buried inside that effort is a fight that Americans should recognize immediately. The fight over whose language counts. I remember sitting in a public school library in Ohio, third grade, staring at a shelf where every single book featured kids who sounded nothing like my grandmother, who spoke a busted mix of Appalachian English that would make a linguistics professor sweat through his jacket. She was not represented. She never was. The British version of this argument is breaking open right now, with advocates insisting that reading-for-pleasure programs have to include linguistic diversity or they are just another way of telling certain kids their English is wrong. And those kids hear that message loud and clear. Loud and clear and early. This is not a small bureaucratic squabble. Language is the thing people use to decide who belongs and who doesn't, who sounds educated and who sounds like they need fixing. Standard English, the approved kind taught in schools and celebrated in reading campaigns, carries enormous social power. It rewards some accents and punishes others. It tells a kid from rural Mississippi or South Texas that their words are broken before they even crack a book open and

Cogitate: A Word That Thinks Too Hard About Itself

Cogitate. Say it out loud and you already feel slightly pretentious, like you just ordered a charcuterie board at a truck stop. The word means to think deeply, to mull something over with real effort, and it has been lurking in English since the 1500s, borrowed from Latin roots tied to the same family of words that gave us cogent and cognition. It never fully shook off its toga. I once heard a professor use it three times in a single lecture, and every time he said it the room went a little colder. Here is the thing about words like cogitate — they carry their own performance inside them. You do not just think, you announce that you are thinking. The word signals effort before any actual effort has been made. English is crammed full of these words, Latinate imports that dress up ordinary mental activity in academic robes and charge admission. The rougher Anglo-Saxon stuff, words like think, mull, brood, chew on, those do the same job without the costume. And yet cogitate keeps showing up, in op-eds, in speeches, in word-of-the-day features aimed at people who want their vocabulary to outrun their

Elizabeth I Never Wrote Those Nasty Letters. Her Secretaries Did.

The Tudor court ran on performance, and nobody performed harder than Elizabeth I. New research is turning over something genuinely ugly about how we talk about her: those famous scorching letters, the ones historians have cited for centuries as proof of her fiery temperament, may have been dressed up by the men who worked for her. Not written. Dressed up. Sharpened. Seasoned with rage she may never have actually expressed. This matters for language people in a way that goes beyond royal gossip. I once sat in a graduate seminar where a professor waved around one of Elizabeth's translated letters like it was scripture, proof of her volatility, her genius, her impossible nature. The whole argument rested on word choice. Specific, furious word choice. If secretaries were cranking up the heat on her prose, then every close reading built on those letters is reading the wrong person. What we call voice is fragile stuff. Attribution is the whole game when you are studying how someone thought, reasoned, fought back through language. Secretaries revising their boss's anger upward is not a footnote. It is a broke foundation under four centuries of scholarship, and the historians who built careers on Elizabeth's so-called temperament are now standing on

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell a word you've never seen written down?

Take your best shot. Type it the way it sounds and hit Enter. Our fuzzy matching will find what you're looking for even if you're miles off. The English language has been making fools of people for centuries — you're in good company.

What's the difference between American and British spelling?

Two nations divided by a common language and a few hundred spelling disagreements. Color or colour. Organize or organise. Center or centre. We show all six major English dialects side by side — US, UK, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand — so you know exactly which spelling is correct for your audience before you embarrass yourself.

What are the most commonly misspelled words in English?

The ones that have been humiliating people for generations. Accommodate. Occurrence. Separate. Necessary. Definitely. We cover over 2,000 of the trickiest words in English because the language was clearly designed by a committee that hated consistency.

Is there a fast way to check spelling without autocorrect mangling it?

Yes. Type the word, hit Enter. No autocorrect, no algorithm deciding it knows better than you, no suggestions you didn't ask for. Just the correct spelling, immediately.

Why does English have so many spelling exceptions?

Because English spent centuries mugging other languages in dark alleys and stealing their words — Latin, French, Norse, Germanic. Each came with its own spelling rules and nobody bothered to reconcile them. We can't fix the language. We can tell you how to spell it.

How do I know which spelling is correct for my country?

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