Easy Learning English Spelling

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• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780007444601
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Writing & Presentation Skills

Collins Easy Learning English Spelling is suitable for anyone who wants to improve their spelling and write more accurately and impressively. By describing the important features of English spelling and rules to use, this e-book makes spelling easy.

Patterns and building blocks

Some groups of letters crop up in lots of different English words. Often a group of letters will indicate the same thing in every word that it appears. For example, the letters RE at the start of a word usually mean ‘again’.

Because so many words are made up of these building blocks, you don’t need to learn every spelling individually. Often you can spell out a word by adding together the blocks of letters that form the word. So it is important to know what these blocks are, how they are joined on to the rest of a word, and what they mean.

Building blocks at the start of words

A block of letters that regularly appears at the start of words and carries a meaning is called a prefix. A prefix can be fixed in front of another word or block of letters to create a new word with a different meaning.

For example, when the letters UN are added to another word (called a root word), they add the meaning of ‘not’ to the sense of the other word.

unnatural

unknown

unholy

Notice that you can spell these words by splitting them into the prefix and the root word, as the spelling of the root word stays the same.

It is not always quite as obvious as this that a prefix is being added to an existing word to make a new word. Many prefixes occur in words that came to English from Latin and Greek. In these cases the blocks to which they are joined are often Latin or Greek forms rather than famil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Contents
• The basics of spelling
• Why you need to work at spelling
• Patterns and building blocks
• Spelling Rules
• Tips for learning hard words
• Words with silent letters
• Single and double letters
• Words with foreign spelling patterns
• Confusable words
• False friends
• Other commonly misspelt words
• Index of hard words