We at SpellingCity.com have to make decisions about which words to include. Ideally, we could include everything that anyone wants. But, there are bills to pay and databases to maintain. So, here is our current decision. Based on future success and interest, we might include more categories.

What we try to include:
- all correctly spelt English words that appear commonly on K-12 spelling tests
- all the countries and their capitals
- all the US states and their capitals

What is not included?
- all non-capital cities
- rivers, lakes, ponds, mountains and their ranges

We have also added some words and lists that are either personal favorites of ours or which we think would be useful. Lists to be aware of:

Big Numbers such as thousands, billions, gazillion. BTW - we use the correct traditional spelling of googol (1 with a hundred zeros and the largest named number), not the name of our favorite search engine.

Dinosaurs such as brontosaurus, carnivore, and variaraptor.

States and Dolch words (by grade)

And yes, we do intend to make some different games and quizzes for lists such as state capitals. Stay tuned....

Does this mean that the SAT-prep words we entered will not be added to the list? It's been weeks since I spent the time to input a number of lists and there are still words that show up on tests as Coming Soon. If there is no plan to include these words, I would appreciate knowing now so that we can just stop checking. I have not wanted to give up on Spelling City because it's such a great idea and DD enjoys using it, but if there are no plans to support our lists, we will have to.

We greatly appreciate your generous comments about our site, and also all the great words you entered. Our main focus is to make sure we have all the main everyday words used in the English language, and then continue to build upon our extensive word database, including words such as SAT-prep words. With so many new word requests, it does take some time to get sentences written for them and then the audio recorded, especially for more obscure words. So please bear with us as we process such a unique batch of words as yours.

Update:
Your words are now up on our site. Please try out your lists, as you can now hear the audio for those words and their sentences.

Post edited by: admin, at: 2007/12/19 10:16

Curious to know what are the top 25 words entered on our site? Well, wonder no more - here they are in order of usage, with the winner so far being...drum roll, please...cat!

1. cat
2. their
3. there
4. brother
5. arm
6. bird
7. by
8. bark
9. blue
10. dog
11. teacher
12. horse
13. been
14. because
15. book
16. another
17. about
18. ask
19. again
20. answer
21. they
22. bring
23. great
24. sat
25. best

I was VERY EXCITED when I saw that someone had put up a vocabulary list from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

We're hoping that we can get vocabulary lists to help people with their studies for many different levels and subjects.

One of our plans for later this year is to introduce a way to categorize each list and rate it by grade level. We might even create some guidelines:

Kindergarten: Consonant-Vowell-Consonant words, the most common sight words.

1st Grade: etc etc.