Can I use my own spelling list?

Yes. Choose “my own words” and type them in, six or more. The sheet is then set from your words and nothing else, and the same check applies to them as to ours: a question with a second possible answer inside your own list is discarded rather than printed. Words with an apostrophe or a hyphen are set aside and named, because a gap in one of those asks about punctuation rather than spelling.

Are the Dolch and Fry lists the real ones?

They are the published lists, transcribed rather than adapted, and the lengths are checked against the numbers those lists are known by — 220 Dolch service words, 95 Dolch nouns, a hundred of Fry's in Fry's own order of frequency rather than sorted. Both were published long enough ago to be out of copyright, which is why they can be reproduced in full here.

If I pick a phonics pattern, will every word really fit it?

Yes, and not because somebody checked carefully. The pattern is a rule — three letters, a consonant then the letter a then a consonant — and every word is put through that rule before it can appear. A word that does not fit is dropped, whoever filed it there.

Spelling Worksheet Generator

The trouble with a missing-letter exercise is the gap that more than one real word fills. Write b_at and a pupil may answer boat, brat or beat — all correct, two of them marked wrong. Every question here is checked against the whole vocabulary for the level before it is set, and any question with a second possible answer is discarded rather than printed. The words can come from the graded lists by length, from a published sight-word list — Dolch or Fry, both long out of copyright and reproduced as published — or from a phonics pattern, where every word on the sheet has been checked against the pattern before printing rather than filed under it by hand — or from your own list, typed in, which stays in your browser and is never sent anywhere.

School year

Sets the level below to the number range usually worked with at that age. Move the level afterwards if it is not right for this child.

What to practise

Level

How many questions

Between 1 and 100.

Which words

Columns

How the sheet is laid out, 1 to 4.

Seed (optional)

A word reproduces exactly the same sheet.

Paper size

Print size

Margin

Millimetres of blank edge, 5 to 40.

Turn the paper sideways

How to print this, or save it as a PDF

There is no PDF to download, and there does not need to be. Open the print command in your browser and choose “Save as PDF” as the destination. The page addresses and dates a browser normally prints across the top and bottom are already kept off.
Set the scale to 100%, not “fit to page”. This sheet is already the exact size of the paper you chose, so anything that resizes it makes every measurement on it wrong.
Leave the paper size in the dialog set to the same one you chose here.

Your worksheet will appear here.

What this generator does

Produces a numbered spelling sheet from a graded vocabulary, discarding any question that the vocabulary itself would allow to be answered more than one way, together with an answer key.

How to use this tool

Choose the exercise — missing vowels, missing letters, unscrambling, ordering or syllables.
Choose a level, which sets how long the words are.
Or pick a published sight-word list or a phonics pattern instead, and the level steps aside.
Or type your own words — this week's spellings, a topic list — and the sheet is set from those and nothing else.
Set how many questions and how many columns.
Show the answers to get the key.

Understanding the controls

Exercise: Fill in the missing vowels, fill in missing letters, unscramble a word, put four words in alphabetical order, or count the syllables.
School year: Year, Grade and Class name the same year and are one option here. It opens the level below at the range usually worked with at that age.
Level: Six levels of vocabulary graded by length, from three-letter words up to long ones like understanding and circumstance.
How many questions: One to a hundred. If the level cannot supply that many unambiguous questions it says so, rather than setting one that has two answers.
Paper size and print size: A4, A5, A3, US Letter or Legal, portrait or landscape, with the margin in millimetres and a compact, standard or large-print setting. The sheet count updates as you change them.
Columns: One to four, which is how the sheet lays out on the page.
Seed: A word reproduces exactly the same sheet.

Common use cases

Weekly spelling practice at a chosen level
Homework with a matching answer key
Filling five minutes at the end of a lesson
Practice for a pupil working on longer words
The same sheet twice: one to hand out, one to mark from

How this generator works

A gapped word is only set when exactly one word in the level's vocabulary fits the pattern, and an unscramble is only set when no other word in the vocabulary uses the same letters. That check is run again on the finished sheet, question by question, reading the printed gap back rather than trusting how it was made. Ordering questions are re-sorted and compared, and syllable counts are recounted by the vowel-group rule.

Randomness and fairness

Words are drawn from the level's vocabulary using the browser's secure generator. A seed reproduces the same sheet exactly — that path is deterministic, not cryptographic, and is meant for printing a sheet twice.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

Uniqueness is judged against this vocabulary, not against every English word. A pupil who knows a word outside the level's list could still find a second answer.
Syllable counting follows the vowel-group rule with a silent-e exception, which is right for ordinary words and wrong for a few unusual ones.
British spellings are used throughout.
A seed reproduces the sheet from the same settings, and the words are one of those settings — so with your own list you need the list as well as the seed to get the sheet back. The seed does not carry the words, because the words never leave your browser.
Nothing Spelling Worksheet Generator produces is kept once the page closes — the seed is the only way back to the same output.

Privacy and your data

A word list you type stays in this browser. It is never transmitted, never stored, and never put in the address bar, and nothing about it reaches this site's counters — those record how many questions a sheet held and no more.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use my own spelling list?: Yes. Choose “my own words” and type them in, six or more. The sheet is then set from your words and nothing else, and the same check applies to them as to ours: a question with a second possible answer inside your own list is discarded rather than printed. Words with an apostrophe or a hyphen are set aside and named, because a gap in one of those asks about punctuation rather than spelling.
Are the Dolch and Fry lists the real ones?: They are the published lists, transcribed rather than adapted, and the lengths are checked against the numbers those lists are known by — 220 Dolch service words, 95 Dolch nouns, a hundred of Fry's in Fry's own order of frequency rather than sorted. Both were published long enough ago to be out of copyright, which is why they can be reproduced in full here.
If I pick a phonics pattern, will every word really fit it?: Yes, and not because somebody checked carefully. The pattern is a rule — three letters, a consonant then the letter a then a consonant — and every word is put through that rule before it can appear. A word that does not fit is dropped, whoever filed it there.