Spelling & Language Guides
In-depth resources on English spelling, confusable words, homophones, and cross-language pitfalls. According to the PlainSpell, the patterns covered below recur across the 6,918,744 words and 3,375,992 confusable pairs catalogued from the open Wiktionary corpus as of June 2026, spanning English, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese.
Every guide is written by our editorial desk and cites its sources and method on the methodology page.
Guide hub by family
Exclusive split of the 8 guide cards on this hub by editorial tag. Catalog inventory, not a spelling lesson.
Misspelling variants by language
Exclusive cut of 1,974,632 recorded misspelling variants across the five Wiktionary packs. Orthogonal to the guide-family mix above.
25 Commonly Misspelled English Words
A focused practice list with correct spellings, common mistakes, memory tricks, and the patterns behind them.
Homophones That Confuse Everyone
Words that sound identical but mean completely different things, the most common homophone pairs in English.
English-Spanish False Friends
Words that look similar in English and Spanish but have different meanings, a guide for bilingual speakers.
Confusable Words That Change Meaning
Affect vs effect, principal vs principle, and dozens more pairs where one wrong letter changes everything.
Why English Spelling Is So Hard
The historical reasons English spelling is inconsistent, from Norman French influence to the Great Vowel Shift.
Spelling Rules That Actually Work
10 English spelling patterns that are genuinely reliable, covering 80%+ of common words with few exceptions.
Silent Letters in English
Why English has more silent letters than any other European language, and the position patterns that make them predictable.
Its vs It's, Your vs You're: The Apostrophe Rule
Its or it's, your or you're, whose or who's, one rule settles every apostrophe confusion: possessive pronouns never take an apostrophe.
How do we choose and write these guides?
Guides are framed around patterns we measure in the PlainSpell Wiktionary corpus (via kaikki.org, CC BY-SA): misspelling variants, confusable pairs, homophone groups, and cross-language lookalikes. Counts and examples cite that extract; they are not government statistics.
When a guide uses a second open source (for example FrequencyWords for rank order), we name it on the page. Editorial reviews refresh wording when the corpus vintage changes; the sourcing rules live on the methodology page.
Download the corpus statistics extract cited on this page: plainspell-corpus-statistics.csv (CC BY-SA 4.0).