How strange that, in all our years of writing Word for Wednesday posts, we’ve never featured the word spelling. A few years ago, we discovered that the word grammar has links to magic – and of course the word spelling does too (magic spell, anyone?). The word dates to the 1660s when it meant ‘manner of forming words with letters’ and came from the Old English spell- and the suffix -ing. The word evolved to mean 'the way a word has been spelled' by the 1730s. In Old English, spell meant ‘story’ and came from the Proto Germanic ‘spellam’. Around 1200 the word spell took on the meaning ‘utterance’ and late...
Over the years, here on the blog, we’ve looked at many of the interesting stories or rumours about where certain words and phrases in the English language originate from. One reason for this is because we believe that knowing the origin can really help trigger your memory when trying to figure out how to spell a word (particularly in the case of word roots). The other reason, of course, is that many of these stories are so interesting and unexpected. If you’re new to our site, here are five of our favourite articles on word origins to get you started. From Avada Kedavra to Abracadabra! Have you ever wondered where our words for magic spells come from? In this article we...
Hello everyone! Are you ready for 2014? For us at Spellzone it feels like December has whizzed by – here’s a round-up of this month’s posts: I started off December by sharing ten mnemonics for remembering how to spell tricky words. Do you always forget how to spell ‘rhythm’, or ‘laugh’, or ‘separate’? This post’s for you! This month, I found myself looking into the origins of the famous magical spells: Open Sesame, Hocus Pocus, and Abracadabra. If you’re into magic, click here for our article on grottos, caverns, killing curses. And if you enjoy this post, you may also be interested in our previous article on made-up wor...
American vs. British English
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English Idioms Explained
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Word Origins & Stories
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One of the students has put in a huge amount of effort in completing Spellzone at least 3 times a week since his arrival with us in January. Looking at his scores after the latest GL testing, his standardised score has risen from 99 to 131. This is a truly phenomenal result. I just wanted to share the best result I have ever seen.
Terrie Penrose-Toms, Casterton College
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