Autumn/Fall Vocabulary In the UK, the Autumn season is in full swing: the days are getting shorter while the leaves are changing colour and falling from trees. Learn some Autumn vocabulary while testing yourself on the qua and squa spelling patterns, -ey endings, the /or/ sound, the long /e/ sound, silent letters, and more. Have you played Autumn Anagrams? The /l/ sound after n For this month’s spelling pattern, we are looking at how to spell the /l/ sound after the letter n at the end of a word. The words in this list all contain the al or el spelling pattern. Learn more about how to spell this sound in Unit 26. Word endings: -le, and exceptions ...
arctic – extremely cold, like in arctic regions The weather channel says we can expect arctic conditions next week. biting – causing a sharply painful or stinging sensation; used especially of cold The wind was biting. bitter – causing a sharply painful or stinging sensation; used especially of cold We walked through a bitter storm. chilly – lacking warmth of feeling I look forward to the chilly Autumn weather because I love wearing cosy jumpers. cool – neither warm nor very cold; giving relief from heat The cool breeze was extremely welcome on the hot day. crisp – pleasantly ...
If you’re one of our regular readers you’ll be familiar with articles about idioms, but every now and then we like to share a recap for our new subscribers. Here are Spellzone we believe that one of the reasons English is such a difficult language to learn is because it’s full of idioms. Every few weeks we take a list of popular idioms and translate them for our second-language English speakers. An idiom is an expression which has a figurative meaning rather than a literal one. For example, when someone says ‘needle in a haystack’ they probably aren’t actually talking about a needle and a haystack, but about something that is as difficult to fi...
For some reason, even though it’s been many years since I finished school, I still associate September with fresh starts. There’s something about the evenings falling slightly earlier each day and the tiniest chill to the summer air that makes me want to knuckle down and achieve my goals before the end of the year. Those of you who speak French, may have noticed that ‘sept’ is the French word for ‘seven’ – a little strange perhaps given that September is the ninth month of the year. This is because until around 700 BC, when the second King of Rome Numa Pompilius added January and February, the Roman calendar was made up of ten ‘officia...
Following the inevitably short-lived spell of wonderful weather we had in the UK this Bank Holiday, it seems only fitting that this week’s blog is weather-related! Just one slight twist, instead of looking into one just word, we’ll be looking into four… The seasons: four cyclic subdivisions of our calendar year that mark shifts in hours of sunlight, the weather and nature. But why the names 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn' and 'winter'? In the 14th century, what we now know as 'spring' was called 'springing-time', presumably a reference to the blossoming of plant life; the spring of the leaf. Through the centuries, the ...
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