Spelling quiz: how good are you?

Mobile users take the test here

As a US National Spelling Bee ends in tie for second year running we take a look back at our popular spelling quiz.

Children take part in the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Maryland (GETTY)

**********

When a leading Oxford academic suggested that using "thru" or "lite" wasn't a grave wrongdoing, there were reportedly "gasps of shock" from the audience at the Hay Festival last year.

•

Simon Horbin, an English professor at Magdalen College, had touched upon one theme that along with grammar, punctuation, the weather and tea, seems to fire up many in Britain today.

Indeed, the comments at the bottom of the article revealed polarised points of view.

"So long as our education system is inhabited by people such as this so called 'professor' then our education system will remain a shambles."

"When making pronouncements of this sort, liberal professors at the great seats of learning fail to appreciate that, in less elevated educational environments, these remarks simply serve to make people feel comfortable with low standards."

"Many of the spellings which are now regarded as 'correct' are so merely because they have become enshrined in dictionaries, despite defying logic, alphabetic consistency and common sense."

During his controversial speech, Prof Horbin went on to explain: “People like to artificially constrain language change. For some reason we think spelling should be entirely fixed and never changed. I am not saying we should just spell freely, but sometimes we have to accept spellings change.”

These views were echoed a few months later by Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University.

In an interview with the Times Educational Supplement, he said that he found the emphasis on grammar and spelling in school "a bit unnecessary".

"Should [students] learn how to write good sentences? Yes, of course they should," he said. "But we have perhaps a mistaken notion that the way in which we write is the right way and that the way in which young people write through their SMS texting language is not the right way."

However, whether you think spelling should stay fixed, or whether you think there should be some kind of redress - as the English Spelling Society suggested at their recent AGM - there's little doubt that rote learning of spelling lists is likely to continue in school.

Especially since a new test of spelling, punctuation and grammar was introduced by the Department for Education last year, as a new component of the national curriculum SATS tests.

The new spelling assessment requires pupils to correctly spell commonly misspelled words such as permanent, preferred and desperately.

Learning spelling by rote was, and will probably remain, the bane of most school children's lives – both in English classes and later in modern foreign language lessons.

In the case of the latter, I distinctly remember the threat of detention hanging in the air for those in the class who didn't score at least 90 per cent – anything below clearly indicated a woeful attempt to learn the 40 new words presented.

In situations where a vowel was called into question, such pressure would often result in the well-known (both to teachers and pupils) 'tricks' of making said letter ambiguous in shape, or by rubbing it out so many times that any of the smudges left of the page could be arguably claimed as correct.

Grave and acute accents could be replaced with a faint horizontal line – ambiguity was the key, yet it was always surprising how little it actually worked. It was almost as if teachers had been there before.

But modern foreign languages aside, the importance of spelling in school remains contentious.

Writing for the Telegraph today, Stephen Linstead, chair of the English Spelling Society says that "the spelling of roughly 35 per cent of the commonest English words is, to a degree, irregular or ambiguous; meaning that the learner has to memorise these words.

"Such a need to memorise irregularity has traditionally been regarded as a minor and inevitable inconvenience for successive generations of school children. But there is growing evidence that this is not just an inconvenience – it costs children precious learning time, and us – as a nation – money."

For some people, spotting a typo in an email is enough for the sender to lose all credibility. Where do you sit on this important issue and how is your spelling?

Can you spot when a word is mispelled? Did you instantly pick up on the mistake in the last sentence? Have a go at our spelling test and see how you do.

Check out our other education quizzes: