Year 5 and 6 Spelling Words: The Full Statutory List

If your child is in Year 5 or Year 6, their teacher is working through the second statutory list from the National Curriculum. These are the year 5 and 6 spelling words, and they’re harder than the Year 3 and 4 set. By the end of Year 6, children are expected to spell words they’ll use for the rest of their lives. Here’s the full list, why these words catch children out, and how to help — without turning every evening into a test.

What are the year 5 and 6 spelling words?

The Department for Education sets two statutory word lists for primary school: one for Years 3 and 4, and one for Years 5 and 6. This second list picks up where the first leaves off. It also leans harder on words your child will meet in topic work, not just everyday writing — think “government”, “parliament” and “environment” rather than “answer” or “different”.

As with the earlier list, schools can teach these 100 words in any order across Year 5 and Year 6. Your child’s class might reach “necessary” in the fourth term but not touch “restaurant” until the following year. Keeping the full list at home means you’re never caught out by which words are due when.

The full year 5 and 6 spelling list

Here is the complete statutory list, taken directly from the National Curriculum’s English Appendix 1, grouped for easier reading:

• accommodate, accompany, according, achieve, aggressive, amateur, ancient, apparent, appreciate, attached
• available, average, awkward, bargain, bruise, category, cemetery, committee, communicate, community
• competition, conscience, conscious, controversy, convenience, correspond, criticise, curiosity, definite, desperate
• determined, develop, dictionary, disastrous, embarrass, environment, equip(ped/ment), especially, exaggerate, excellent
• existence, explanation, familiar, foreign, forty, frequently, government, guarantee, harass, hindrance
• identity, immediate(ly), individual, interfere, interrupt, irrelevant, language, leisure, lightning, marvellous
• mischievous, muscle, necessary, neighbour, nuisance, occupy, occur, opportunity, parliament, persuade
• physical, prejudice, privilege, profession, programme, pronunciation, queue, recognise, recommend, relevant
• restaurant, rhyme, rhythm, sacrifice, secretary, shoulder, signature, sincere(ly), soldier, stomach
• sufficient, suggest, symbol, system, temperature, thorough, twelfth, variety, vegetable, vehicle, yacht

Why these particular words trip children up

Compared with the Year 3 and 4 list, these words are longer, less phonetic, and often borrowed from other languages. A few patterns explain most of the trouble:

• Words borrowed from French. “Restaurant”, “queue” and “yacht” don’t spell the way they sound in English, because they aren’t originally English words.
• Doubled consonants that don’t feel obvious. “Accommodate” has a double c and a double m; “embarrass” has a double r and a double s. There’s no shortcut here — children need to notice the pattern by sight.
• Subject vocabulary from topic lessons. “Government”, “parliament” and “environment” show up in history and geography lessons early. As a result, the words often arrive before the spelling skill does.
• The “-ous” and “-ice”/”-ise” endings. “Mischievous”, “disastrous” and “conscious” use endings that sound similar but aren’t interchangeable. Similarly, “criticise” and “advertise” trip children up in the same way.
• Silent or shifted letters. “Rhythm” and “rhyme” both start with a silent h; “muscle” hides a silent c.

Because so many of these words are irregular, repetition and familiarity matter more than any single spelling rule.

Simple ways to help at home

You don’t need a formal lesson plan for this list either. Short, regular practice beats one long cramming session, so try these instead:

• Break long words into chunks. “Ac-com-mo-date” is far easier to hold in memory than the word as one block of letters.
• Group words by pattern. Put “government”, “parliament” and “environment” together on one evening. Spotting the shared “-ment” ending makes all three easier to remember.
• Focus on five words at a time. A short, rotating list stays memorable; the full 100 at once doesn’t.
• Write them by hand, not on a screen. Handwriting anchors spelling in a way typing doesn’t, even for a quick practice note.
• Let them teach the word back to you. Asking “how would you explain that spelling to a friend?” often reveals whether it’s actually sunk in.

Turn spelling practice into something they actually want to do

A list of a hundred words can feel like a mountain. That’s especially true for a child who’s already tired after a full school day. Some children respond far better when tricky words show up inside a story they’re enjoying, rather than on a worksheet with their name at the top.

That’s the idea behind Inkwood Adventures, our story-based game for ages 7–11. Your child reads and plays their way through an adventure. Spelling and vocabulary practice is built into the story itself, not bolted on as homework. You can play chapter one free and see whether it clicks for your child.

For more ways to build these skills at home, see our guides to the year 3 and 4 spelling words, fun KS2 spelling games, and prefixes and suffixes for KS2.

The bottom line

The year 5 and 6 spelling words are harder than the list before them. Even so, they follow the same principle: repetition beats memorising a rule that doesn’t quite fit. Chunk the long words, group the similar endings, and keep sessions short. And if the flashcards are wearing thin by Year 6, a story-based game can quietly carry on the practice — without another round of groans at the kitchen table.

Share on Facebook

Post on X

Follow us

Save