Image by “Jimmie” on Flickr.com.

Last month I wrote a post about some common spelling rule differences between British and American English. That post was about spelling rules that can be applied to many different words, in systematic ways, in either America or Great Britain.

This post is about specific words that are just spelled differently in these two countries. The words we look at today are spelled differently because they are pronounced differently. So, over time the way these words have come to be spelled have changed because of the accent differences between the United States and Great Britain. Accent differences between American and British English are many, but this is just an introduction for you as you learn these spelling differences.

Here is a list of some important words to know that have differences in spelling and pronunciation.

A great way to practice your spelling in British or American English, and build your vocabulary, it to play the game Scrabble. Scrabble is a word game for multiple players, who score points by spelling words using letter tiles, each tile has a single letter (like in the picture at the top of this post), the letter tiles are placed on a game board to spell words and new words have to be formed using at least one letter from an existing word. You might want to get together a group of your fellow ESL learners to try out a game of Scrabble, to practice your English and impress your friends with your knowledge of both the American and British English spellings of words!