SBI Clerk · Bite-size lessons

Spelling Check

About 5 min · English Language · English

Time worked out from the lesson's 232 words at 150 words a minute, plus a minute for each question.

Spelling Check questions test your ability to identify correctly or incorrectly spelt words from a given set of options. Unlike grammar or comprehension, spelling questions have no grey area — the answer is either right or wrong, making them high-scoring if you have prepared well.

Key ideas

• Silent letters are spelling traps: Words like "knowledge," "psychology," "debt," and "receipt" contain letters you don't hear when speaking.
• Double consonants follow specific patterns: Words ending in a single vowel + single consonant usually double the consonant before adding -ed or -ing (occur → occurred, refer → referred). Exceptions exist.
• The "i before e except after c" rule has many exceptions: "Receive," "ceiling," and "deceive" follow the rule, but "weird," "seize," and "neither" break it.
• Suffixes change spelling in predictable ways: Adding -ful creates one 'l' (beautiful, not beautifull). Adding -ly to words ending in 'l' keeps both (finally, usually).
• American vs British spellings both appear: Common pairs: color/colour, center/centre, honor/honour, realize/realise.

Quick reference

• Double c, double m: accommodation (cc, mm), recommend (one c, mm), accidental (cc)
• Double r: occurrence, embarrass, irregular
• Silent letters: knowledge (k), psychology (p), receipt (p), debt (b)
• -ance vs -ence: maintenance, attendance, independence, excellence
• -able vs -ible: available, responsible, comfortable, flexible

Check yourself: 3 questions

This lesson is cut from the topic's note, not rewritten. Fact-checked on 18 Oct 2026: an AI-assisted check of this note against cited sources; the errors it found were corrected that day. Some errors may remain. The questions are from Shishya's validated question bank.

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