SpellChirp

100 words · ages 9–11

Fry's fifth hundred: all 100 words

Words 401 to 500 — halfway to a thousand, with government, language and equation. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. done
  2. English
  3. road
  4. half
  5. ten
  6. fly
  7. gave
  8. box
  9. finally
  10. wait
  11. correct
  12. oh
  13. quickly
  14. person
  15. became
  16. shown
  17. minutes
  18. strong
  19. verb
  20. stars
  21. front
  22. feel
  23. fact
  24. inches
  25. street
  26. decided
  27. contain
  28. course
  29. surface
  30. produce
  31. building
  32. ocean
  33. class
  34. note
  35. nothing
  36. rest
  37. carefully
  38. scientists
  39. inside
  40. wheels
  41. stay
  42. green
  43. known
  44. island
  45. week
  46. less
  47. machine
  48. base
  49. ago
  50. stood
  51. plane
  52. system
  53. behind
  54. ran
  55. round
  56. boat
  57. game
  58. force
  59. brought
  60. understand
  61. warm
  62. common
  63. bring
  64. explain
  65. dry
  66. though
  67. language
  68. shape
  69. deep
  70. thousands
  71. yes
  72. clear
  73. equation
  74. yet
  75. government
  76. filled
  77. heat
  78. full
  79. hot
  80. check
  81. object
  82. am
  83. rule
  84. among
  85. noun
  86. power
  87. cannot
  88. able
  89. six
  90. size
  91. dark
  92. ball
  93. material
  94. special
  95. heavy
  96. fine
  97. pair
  98. circle
  99. include
  100. built

Practise these 100 words, free

One tap puts the whole list in the nest. Each word arrives with a definition a child can read, audio and its syllables — then SpellChirp reads them out, marks the spelling and brings back the ones that went wrong. No account needed to start, and no advertising on either plan.

Add all 100 wordsPrint a practice sheet

Where this list comes from

Edward Fry's Instant Words, first published in 1957 and updated in 1980, drawn from a frequency count of American English. Published for classroom use and freely reproduced.

The most common words in English, in the order they are most common. The first hundred alone account for about half of all written English.

How to practise a list this long

Not all at once. Five to ten words a week is the pace that sticks; a list of a hundred is a term’s work, not a weekend’s, and a child who meets ten words five times learns more than one who meets fifty once.

Sight words are the ones that cannot be sounded out, so sounding them out is the wrong tool. Look at the shape of the whole word, say it, cover it, write it — then check the letters against the original rather than the sound.

Count a word as learned when it has been spelled correctly on three separate days. That is the rule SpellChirp uses, and it is roughly where a word stops needing to be looked up.