‘Watch your spelling’ tests you on advanced spelling – including words that native English speakers often slip up on!
Depending on whom you ask, English ~ with its seemingly simple basic grammar and huge expressive richness ~ has either a blessing or a curse when it comes to its spelling 'system'. How accurate are you with some of our more complex and/or confusable words?
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Answer 3 is the only fully correct version; allegedly Shakespeare himself spelt his own name with about two dozen variants, but the version we approve here is regarded as the standard.
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Some of these words are semi-irregular, but none is particularly uncommon; check with your dictionary (or a grammar book, for formation of the two adverbs).
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Only Answer 4 has all the words correct within the same version.
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'Cruficixion' (as a word) can perhaps best be thought-of as a '-ion' abstract-style noun from the concrete noun 'crucifix' (an image, perhaps in miniature, of the traditional Roman executioners' cross).
The other key words here do rhyme with it, but the point is that their spelling does not match it. |
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'Yachts' is a loan-word into English from across the North Sea and is, of course, irregularly pronounced. There is a pun, of sorts, on whether a boat is 'saleable' (i.e. whether it may plausibly and legally be offered for people to buy it) and 'sailable' (whether it can be sailed, or undertake a voyage under its own power).
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Hardly a very pleasant topic, but it has its vocabulary like anything else; Answer 2 is the only fully correct version.
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Answer 1 offers the correct form of each (mostly, related) term throughout.
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This one is largely about spellings that pivot on a letter G, with its two different phonetic values. There's no need for an extra E in 'changing', because it can't easily be confused with anything else; but we need to distinguish between 'swingeing' and parts of the more familiar verb 'swing'.
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Further issues with 'G' here; and please don't confuse 'borders' (flower-beds along the edge of a garden) with 'boarders' (students who lodge overnight within their school).
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Further catch-words here; the nephew has presumably looked at the shapely layout and willfully misheard the word 'herbaceous' ( = full of growing things) as 'curvaceous' (shapely; an epithet traditionally applied to the generous figure of some women, but ~ quite rightly ~ not so often heard these days).
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