Insights across Spelling Tests from the 2025-2026 School Year

In many countries, another school year is in the books. To mark the occasion, we dug into the data from Spelling Test Buddy, over 170,000 student test results across thousands of classrooms, to see what patterns emerged from the 2025-2026 school year.

Here is what we found.

The 10 most commonly tested spelling words

One pattern stands out immediately: most of these words are what teachers call “irregular” or “exception” words - words where the spelling doesn’t match what you’d expect from the sounds alone. Caught, through, thought, because, beautiful, they, and their all have letter combinations that don’t follow standard phonics rules.

This isn’t a coincidence. As the Science of Reading movement has taken hold in classrooms across the country, teachers have renewed their focus on explicitly teaching high-frequency, irregularly spelled words. Exactly the words that appear most often on students’ spelling lists.

The appearance of shirt at number six is telling. It’s a short, simple word, but the “ir” vowel pattern is a focal point in early phonics instruction. Seeing it here suggests many teachers are incorporating phonics pattern practice directly into their spelling tests, not just traditional vocabulary lists.

Enjoyment is the one multi-morpheme word in the top ten. It consists of a base word (enjoy) plus a suffix (-ment). This aligns with the growing emphasis on morphology instruction, which research shows strengthens both spelling and reading comprehension, especially in upper grades.

Those are the words that are tested the most. Now, which words are misspelled the most?

The 10 most commonly misspelled spelling words

These words are genuinely hard, and the misspell rates show it. More than four out of five students who attempted supplementary and discriminatory spelled them wrong. A few patterns explain why so many of these words trip students up.

The “-ory” trap

Four of the ten words end in -ory or -ary (supplementary, discriminatory, observatory, documentary). Students frequently add or swap a syllable, writing “supplementery” or “observatorie”, because the unstressed vowel before the suffix blurs when spoken aloud. Latinate vocabulary is full of this pattern, and it takes deliberate practice to internalize.

Silent letters and unusual letter combinations

Pseudonym (with its silent p) and acquiesce (with the rare cqu cluster) are nearly impossible to spell by sounding out alone. These words require explicit instruction; there’s no phonics shortcut to land on the correct spelling.

Words that look simpler than they are

Caterpillar, literary, and disastrous feel like familiar words, which is part of why they catch students off guard. Disastrous is routinely written as “disasterous”. It’s a perfectly logical guess, but wrong. Literary becomes “literery” because the middle syllables collapse in natural speech. Students know these words by ear; spelling them is a different skill.

Academic vocabulary across content areas

Thermodynamics and documentary are words students encounter in science and social studies, not spelling class. Mastering them requires both vocabulary knowledge and spelling practice, which serves as a reminder that spelling instruction shouldn’t stop after third grade.

What teachers can take away

The most commonly tested words reflect classrooms that are taking irregular, high-frequency words seriously, exactly what the Science of Reading recommends. The most commonly misspelled words, meanwhile, are largely Latin- and Greek-derived academic vocabulary where letter combinations resist phonetic logic.

For both categories, the research is clear: repeated, spaced practice is what moves the needle. As studies consistently show, students who take spelling tests improve, but the hardest words need more than one attempt to stick. Seeing these words on a list once isn’t enough. Building them into regular practice tests, tracking which students are missing them, and returning to them weeks later is how mastery happens.

We’re looking forward to seeing what the 2026-2027 school year brings.