Spelling Rules - Pueblo County School District 70

Spelling Rules

1. Every English word has a vowel. 2. Multi-syllabic words have a vowel in each syllable. 3. In English, the letter q is always followed by u. 4. No English word ends with v. 5. An apostrophe is used to indicate the omission of a letter. 6. An apostrophe s is used to show possession in words not ending in s (e.g. dog's bone;

children's playground); an apostrophe alone is used to show possession in words ending in s, with the exception of some proper names (e.g. girls' dormitory; Mars' atmosphere; Charles's notebook. 7. Basic phonics generalizations apply to many short and long vowel words (See .....) 8. Double the final consonant in a short vowel word ending with a single consonant when adding a suffix (e.g. stop, stopping; run, running) 9. Double the final consonant of words with more than one syllable ending with a single short vowel followed by a single consonant if the accent is on the last syllable (e.g. forbid, forbidden) 10. Plurals of nouns ending with s, ss, sh, ch, or x are formed by adding es (e.g. bus, buses; kiss, kisses; bush, bushes; match, matches; box, boxes). 11. Some nouns will change their spelling to form plurals (mouse, mice; woman, women) 12. Drop the final silent e for suffixes beginning with a vowel; retain the silent e for suffixes beginning with a consonant (care, caring; care, careful) 13. In base words with c or g before the final silent e, the e is retained if the suffix begins with a (e.g. noticeable, changeable) 14. Change y to i when y is preceded by a consonant unless the suffix begins with i (e.g. candy, candies, buy, buying) 15. Place i before e except after c, or when sounded like a as in neighbor or weigh. Some common exceptions to this rule are: either, weird, foreign, sovereign, forfeited, leisure, neither, seized, counterfeit, protein. 16. In words ending with a single f, change f to v and add es to form the plural (e.g. knife, knives; wolf, wolves)

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download