Spelling Quiz - Words beginning with mu... (Questions)

Can mussels pull muscles? Play this KS3 spelling quiz on words beginning at mu.

"I just use my muscles as a conversation piece, like someone walking a cheetah down 42nd Street." - Arnold Schwarzenegger.

English is a voracious language. It adds new words all the time. Many of these words are invented. Often words are created by changing a word from one function to another, for instance by using a noun as a verb. At other times, words are borrowed outright from another language. This is usually a sign that the other language has words for objects or concepts unfamiliar to those who speak English and therefore difficult to express through existing vocabulary. "Cheetah", for instance, was borrowed into English from Hindi.

It went through many spellings, including "cito", "chittah", "cheeta" and "chetah". Working out how to spell a borrowed word can be difficult, especially when the original language is written in a different script or assigns different letters to sounds, when compared to English spelling conventions. Eventually the spelling of such a word settles into the version accepted by the most people. It is not surprising then that knowing how to spell words which were originally borrowed into English is not always a straightforward matter! But practice always helps.