Discover how spelling works in only five minutes a week.

One Step Now Education May 29, 2026 polyglot A linguist studies how languages work. They may know many languages by virtue of their continued studies. However, the actual word for someone who knows a lot of languages is polyglot. I thought we might take a moment to investigate this word. This investigation will look at a Greek compound and connections between parts of our speaking apparatus and our language. You'll see how similarly spelled elements aren't necessarily related. Finally, we'll...

One Step Now Education May 22, 2026 tantalize I've always had an interesting connection in my head when I see or read this word: A tarantula When I was younger, my father was a police officer, and they had a tarantula at the police department. Of course I was tantalized by the fascinating creature. My mind twisted the word tarantula and the word tantalize, because they share many of the same graphemes. And yet, we know that's not how the English orthographic system works. Just because words...

One Step Now Education May 15, 2026 inherently I was researching how students learn to comprehend what they are reading and the problem of coherence. The language of a passage can assist with a student's coherence, the ability to create a successful mental model of what's occurring in the text. Words that show relationships, like however or because, can be signposts of coherence. Shortly afterward, I overhead the word inherently, and immediately I began wondering about the potential...

One Step Now Education May 8, 2026 incarcerated Curiosity about a word's base may lead you to a word investigation. I don't listen often to the local news, but while trying to get more information about local weather, I overheard the newscaster say this word several times in the broadcast. In our investigation, we'll first pass by collocations and see how they can help us with meaning. Then we'll look at some common prefixes and suffixes like the suffix <-ate> and the past participle suffix...

One Step Now Education May 1, 2026 mnemonic This investigation takes us from spelling tricks to ancient Greek, where we'll uncover the unusual structure hiding inside the word mnemonic. That strange <mn> at the beginning is a clue about the word's origin and a gateway to understanding how letters can shift their jobs across a word family. We'll discover what makes a digraph work (and when it stops working), explore what happens when sounds vanish but letters remain, and meet the zeroed...

One Step Now Education April 24, 2026 discomfit Words are often intriguing to me because I'm unsure of their base or I see a familiar base and I wonder if it's the same. With discomfit, it's the latter. Could the base possibly be <fit>? This investigation will explore the verbal inflectional paradigm and see how the past participle can function beyond just tense. We'll trace this word back through Middle English and the Norman Conquest, and along the way, you might discover that several...