SpellChirp

108 words · ages 7–9 · Years 3 and 4

Year 3 and 4 statutory words: all 108 words

The words every English school must teach by the end of Year 4. Every word is below — copy them, print the page, or tap once to have SpellChirp hatch the lot with definitions, audio and syllables.
  1. accident
  2. accidentally
  3. actual
  4. actually
  5. address
  6. answer
  7. appear
  8. arrive
  9. believe
  10. bicycle
  11. breath
  12. breathe
  13. build
  14. busy
  15. business
  16. calendar
  17. caught
  18. centre
  19. century
  20. certain
  21. circle
  22. complete
  23. consider
  24. continue
  25. decide
  26. describe
  27. different
  28. difficult
  29. disappear
  30. early
  31. earth
  32. eight
  33. eighth
  34. enough
  35. exercise
  36. experience
  37. experiment
  38. extreme
  39. famous
  40. favourite
  41. February
  42. forward
  43. fruit
  44. grammar
  45. group
  46. guard
  47. guide
  48. heard
  49. heart
  50. height
  51. history
  52. imagine
  53. increase
  54. important
  55. interest
  56. island
  57. knowledge
  58. learn
  59. length
  60. library
  61. material
  62. medicine
  63. mention
  64. minute
  65. natural
  66. naughty
  67. notice
  68. occasion
  69. occasionally
  70. often
  71. opposite
  72. ordinary
  73. particular
  74. peculiar
  75. perhaps
  76. popular
  77. position
  78. possess
  79. possession
  80. possible
  81. potatoes
  82. pressure
  83. probably
  84. promise
  85. purpose
  86. quarter
  87. question
  88. recent
  89. regular
  90. reign
  91. remember
  92. sentence
  93. separate
  94. special
  95. straight
  96. strange
  97. strength
  98. suppose
  99. surprise
  100. therefore
  101. though
  102. although
  103. thought
  104. through
  105. various
  106. weight
  107. woman
  108. women

Practise these 108 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 108 wordsPrint a practice sheet

Where this list comes from

The statutory word lists from the English National Curriculum (Department for Education, 2013), published under the Open Government Licence.

The words English primary schools are required to teach. Year 1 and 2 are the common exception words — the ones that break the phonics rules — and Years 3 to 6 are the statutory lists.

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.