Word for Wednesday: Beautiful

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Our Word for Wednesday theme for 2023 is tricky spelling words. This year, after sharing the definition and etymology of each week’s word, we will end every blog post with some tips and tricks to help you spell it.

In February, we looked at the words receive, necessary, separate, and extremely. Our first tricky spelling word for March is beautiful.

If something is beautiful, it means it is pleasing to the eye or delightful to the senses. The word is also used to describe prefect weather conditions. 

Here is beautiful used in some example sentences:

  • My new dress is a beautiful shade of green.
  • The sound of beautiful music filled the air. 
  • It was a beautiful day and we went to the beach. 

Beautiful dates to the mid-fifteenth century and made from the word beauty plus the suffix -ful.  

Beauty dates to the early-fourteenth century and comes from the word ‘bealte’ meaning ‘physical attractiveness’ or ‘goodness’. The word entered English via Anglo-French, Old French, and Vulgar Latin, and ultimately comes from the Latin ‘bellus’ meaning ‘handsome’ or ‘charming’. 

The word beautiful is an example of changing the letter ‘y’ to an ‘i’ when adding a suffix. Learn more words like this in Spellzone Unit 9. Suffixes: why we need to double letters, change them, or drop 'e'.

A trick to remember how to spell the first part of this word is say the following to yourself: Beautiful Elephants Aren’t Ugly.


01 Mar 2023
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One of the students has put in a huge amount of effort in completing Spellzone at least 3 times a week since his arrival with us in January. Looking at his scores after the latest GL testing, his standardised score has risen from 99 to 131. This is a truly phenomenal result. I just wanted to share the best result I have ever seen.

Terrie Penrose-Toms, Casterton College

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