15-Question Spelling Quiz

Finish all fifteen rounds with 65 points or better and you have earned something rare: proof that you can spell without autocorrect running cleanup behind you. This quiz covers the English words adults get wrong most often, from definitely to supersede, with a couple of myth-busting rounds on the famous i-before-e rhyme mixed in. Most takers finish in 4 to 6 minutes, and every answer comes back instantly with an explanation, so even the questions you miss hand you a trick worth keeping.

The fifteen rounds, and why these words fool people

The warm-up sets the tone: "It means 'without a doubt', and autocorrect fixes it for millions of people every day." From there the quiz walks through the classics. Separate, where nearly everyone swaps the middle a for an e. Embarrass, with its double r and double s. Cemetery, accommodate, rhythm, occurrence, conscience, mischievous, and liaison each get a round, and each explanation carries the memory hook that makes the spelling stick: there is "a rat" in separate, rhythm's only vowel is the y, and conscience is literally science with a con in front.

Two true-or-false rounds go after the i-before-e rhyme directly. One asks whether the rule can be trusted at all (it cannot; weird, seize, height, and science all break it), and one asks whether weird itself obeys it. Two select-all spot checks hide traps like harass, occasion, consensus, and argument among correctly spelled neighbors, so takers have to judge five words at once rather than pick from four. The last round is labeled a final boss for a reason: supersede is commonly cited as the only English word ending in -sede, and concede, precede, and recede lure confident spellers straight into supercede.

Every round is worth 10 points, for 150 in total, and the pass mark sits at 65. That means you can miss a handful and still pass, which feels fair for a language this inconsistent.

The classrooms and offices that use it

Teachers use it as a vocabulary warm-up or a Friday review, since the explanations do the reteaching automatically. ESL instructors and adult education programs like it because the words are genuinely useful: these are spellings students will need in emails and cover letters, not spelling-bee obscurities. And plenty of teams run it purely for bragging rights. The built-in leaderboard turns fifteen questions into an office competition, and the Medium difficulty rating means nobody aces it without paying attention.

Ten minutes before the Friday call

Picture an office manager dropping the quiz link into the team channel with the message "pass mark is 65, leaderboard is public." Because question order is randomized for each taker, nobody can copy a neighbor's sequence, and because skipping is switched off, everyone has to commit to an answer before moving ahead. A progress bar shows how deep into the fifteen they are, and back navigation lets the second-guessers revise before submitting. By the time the call starts, the leaderboard has settled the argument about who the team's best speller is, at least until the retakes begin, since the quiz lets anyone chasing a better score take another run at it.

Make it your own word list

Everything in the template is editable. Swap any of the fifteen words for the ones your students actually miss, rewrite the wrong-answer options, or change the explanations to match mnemonics you already teach. You can raise the pass mark above 65 for an advanced class, adjust point values, or turn off instant feedback if you want a formal test feel instead of a learning tool. There is no timer by default, and you can add your own logo and colors so the quiz looks like yours, not ours.

Getting it in front of your spellers

Share the quiz with a direct link, a QR code on a classroom screen, or a social post. It embeds in any site with a snippet, and if your site runs on WordPress, the Uplup plugin gives you a shortcode to paste straight into a page or post. As responses come in, the analytics show how each of the fifteen questions performed, so you can see whether it was mischievous or supersede that wrecked the class average. Export everything to CSV for gradebooks, or push results to other tools through webhooks and Zapier. It is all on Uplup's free plan, so you can copy the template, edit it, and send it out today.