Year 5 and 6 Spelling List: All 100 Statutory Words and How to Learn Them

The Year 5 and 6 spelling list is the set of 100 statutory words in the national curriculum for England that children are expected to learn to spell by the end of Year 6, from accommodate and achieve to vehicle and yacht. All 100 words appear in the table that follows, in alphabetical order.

The Department for Education describes the Years 5 and 6 list as a mixture of words pupils use often in their writing and words they often misspell. Schools teach it alongside the spelling rules for the same years, so a child who understands why a word is spelt as it is will usually remember it for longer than one who has only copied it out.

What is on the Year 5 and 6 statutory spelling list?

The list contains 100 words, and a few entries carry a related form in brackets, such as equip with equipped and equipment, immediate with immediately, and sincere with sincerely. Criticise is shown as critic plus ise, which points to how the word is built, and conscience and conscious are marked with an asterisk because the curriculum's notes explain them through the word science: conscience is science with the prefix con- added.

Most of the words share a feature that makes them hard to spell by sound alone: a double letter that is not heard (accommodate, embarrass, committee), an unstressed vowel (definite, desperate, category), a silent letter (yacht, rhythm, muscle) or a spelling borrowed from another language (queue, restaurant, leisure).

How the list fits the Year 5 and 6 spelling rules

The word list sits alongside the statutory spelling content for Years 5 and 6, and many of the listed words are examples of those rules. Endings that sound like shus are spelt -cious or -tious, as in conscious, and endings that sound like shul are spelt -cial or -tial, with -cial common after a vowel letter. Words ending in -ant, -ance, -ent and -ence follow patterns that often depend on related words, and listed words such as existence and convenience show the -ence ending.

The same years cover the i before e except after c rule for the long ee sound, words containing ough, silent letters, the -able and -ible endings, and homophones and other words that are often confused, such as advice and advise or practice and practise. Teaching a listed word together with its rule lets a child spell the rest of the family as well.

• Double consonants that are easy to miss: accommodate, aggressive, committee, embarrass, harass, necessary, occur, opportunity.
• Unstressed or unclear vowels: average, category, cemetery, definite, desperate, environment, government, parliament.
• Silent or unexpected letters: yacht, rhythm, muscle, foreign, conscience and the easily missed n in government.
• Borrowed spellings: amateur, queue, restaurant, leisure, yacht, and pronunciation, which drops the o of pronounce.

Which words do children find hardest?

The words children most often get wrong are the ones where the spoken form gives no clue to the written one. Pronunciation is a common example, since it is spelt nun in the middle even though the verb is pronounce, and so is mischievous, which has no i after the v despite being said that way in casual speech.

Others catch children out because of a single letter: twelfth keeps its f, forty loses the u of four, lightning has no e after the t, and vegetable keeps an e in the middle that is rarely heard. A useful check after each practice session is to list the words a child misspelt and look for the same type of error, since one rule often accounts for several mistakes.

How to learn the Year 5 and 6 words

Short, frequent practice works better for spelling than long sessions, and ten words a week across a school year covers the whole list with time left for revision. A practical routine is to learn a small group, test it a few days later without the words in view, and carry any word spelt wrongly into the next week's group.

Methods that make a child attend to the structure of the word tend to help most. Splitting a word into syllables (de-ter-mined), finding a smaller word inside it (the lie in believe, from the earlier list), and saying a tricky word as it is spelt (en-vi-ron-ment, with the n sounded) all give the child something to remember beyond the look of the word. Word history helps too: the curriculum's own notes point out that desperate comes from the Latin spero, meaning to hope, which explains the e, and that familiar is related to family.

• Look, say, cover, write, check: read the word aloud, cover it, write it from memory and compare letter by letter.
• Word families: learn necessary with necessarily, or immediate with immediately, so one effort covers several forms.
• Sentences: write each word in a sentence of the child's own, which also shows whether the meaning is secure.
• Mixed review: once a group is learnt, include it in later tests so it stays in long-term memory.

How spelling is assessed at the end of Year 6

Spelling is assessed at the end of key stage 2 through the English grammar, punctuation and spelling test, which includes a separate spelling paper in which children write words dictated in sentences. Teachers also judge spelling in children's own writing when they make their teacher assessment of writing, so the words need to be spelt correctly in independent work as well as in a test.

For children sitting an 11+ test, spelling can also count directly: some tests include spelling questions, and accurate spelling supports the writing tasks set by many independent schools. The statutory list is a sound base for both, because it targets words a child in upper key stage 2 will use.

How does it link to the Year 3 and 4 list?

The Year 5 and 6 list builds on the Years 3 and 4 list, which has its own 100 statutory words, including separate, February, library and particular. The curriculum asks schools to revise work done in previous years, so a child moving into Year 5 benefits from a quick check of the earlier list before starting on the new one.

Children who are secure on the earlier list usually find the later words easier, since many of the patterns repeat with longer words. A child still unsure of the earlier words is better served by consolidating those first, then moving on.

Related guides

• Year 6 SATs: papers, timings and scores
• 11+ English preparation guide
• KS2 reading list
• Primary school tutoring

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