Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

One Step Now Education Sept. 12, 2025 malarkey It used to amuse me when former President Joe Biden would utter, "Malarkey!" It's such an old-fashioned word which coincided with his old-fashioned persona at times as "Grandpa Joe." I started to wonder, "Is there something to this word?" Or is this just one of those words that someone made up? A nonsense word of sorts? In this investigation, we'll look at register and what a corpus is. We'll look at one characteristic of nouns. We may even run...

One Step Now Education Sept. 5, 2025 obfuscated Being curious about words is difficult to shut off. Even an email can prompt a word investigation. "What school offers is straightforward though often obfuscated: we promote the long-term flourishing of young people by teaching them toward mastery of the disciplines." "What is the base of obfuscated?" I wondered. As you follow this investigation, we will visit synonyms and how they are helpful to authors. We’ll uncover how the suffix <-ed> forms...

One Step Now Education August 29, 2025 hideous Last Halloween, I was doing an activity with a student based on photos of people in costumes. One student remarked that someone's costume was hideous. I marked it down for investigation one day. I wonder if there's a relationship to the free base hide? After all, if something is hideous, it makes me want to run and hide? In our investigation, we'll look at the word's definition and how context could obscure it. As we look further at the base,...

One Step Now Education August 22, 2025 trepidatious Again, my reading has led me to an interesting word to investigate. This time, a subject was trepidatious about entering grad school. I began to wonder if the word was related to intrepid. If you want to skip ahead to the Relatives section to find the answer, feel free, but keep reading if you want to know more about nouns, adjectives, and subject complements. You may find out how suffixes help us determine a word's class and assist with...

One Step Now Education August 15, 2025 ubiquitous Zoom meetings were ubiquitous after the pandemic. After reading this sentence in an article, I began to wonder, "Is this word related to quit?" As we investigate ubiquitous, we'll discuss how students use context to learn about word meanings. We will take a hard look at bases and affixation. We'll explore how looks can be deceiving and run into yet another way to spell our old friend schwa. Meaning What is this word's meaning and how does the...

One Step Now Education August 8, 2025 proclivity I was reading the book Math for English Majors and started thinking about a post I wrote discussing members of the scientific word study community that have a proclivity for math. When you've been at this a while, you do a quick analysis in your head, peeling off familiar prefixes and suffixes. Sometimes, you are left with an interesting base that prompts an investigation to see what other members of the family exist. In our investigation of...