Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

One Step Now Education June 19, 2026 congenial; congenital This is a pair of words I'm always having to sort out in my head like affect/effect. I know that sometimes knowing the structure of a word can help us understanding its meaning better, because the meaning of a word is suggested by the elements that compose the word. For example, consent is composed of a prefix <con-> that lends a sense of "with" to the base <sent>, "feel." So if you give your consent, you "feel with" that person; you...

One Step Now Education June 12, 2026 blatant Sometimes you hear a word quite a bit in everyday speech. It comes up over and over in different rooms with different crowds. I heard blatant for probably the fourth time in a short period of time on a podcast. I knew someone was saying somewhere, "Please investigate!" How much do you know about this word? Get ready to find out more about connotation and denotationalongside a syntactic test for adjectives. We'll sort out the difference between...

One Step Now Education June 5, 2026 cashaw No, it's not a nut. On Thursday, May 28th, 14-year-old Shrey Parikh correctly spelled this word to become the champion of the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee. But what is a cashaw? Not only will we find out why this word is spelled the way it is, we will take a look at indigenous languages and the words they bring to our lexicon. We'll learn how languages adopt and adapt words. We'll take a look at how some digraphs have place value, including the...

One Step Now Education May 29, 2026 polyglot A linguist studies how languages work. They may know many languages by virtue of their continued studies. However, the actual word for someone who knows a lot of languages is polyglot. I thought we might take a moment to investigate this word. This investigation will look at a Greek compound and connections between parts of our speaking apparatus and our language. You'll see how similarly spelled elements aren't necessarily related. Finally, we'll...

One Step Now Education May 22, 2026 tantalize I've always had an interesting connection in my head when I see or read this word: A tarantula When I was younger, my father was a police officer, and they had a tarantula at the police department. Of course I was tantalized by the fascinating creature. My mind twisted the word tarantula and the word tantalize, because they share many of the same graphemes. And yet, we know that's not how the English orthographic system works. Just because words...

One Step Now Education May 15, 2026 inherently I was researching how students learn to comprehend what they are reading and the problem of coherence. The language of a passage can assist with a student's coherence, the ability to create a successful mental model of what's occurring in the text. Words that show relationships, like however or because, can be signposts of coherence. Shortly afterward, I overhead the word inherently, and immediately I began wondering about the potential...