Spelling Quiz is a five-round, two-step English game in which players identify the single misspelled word among four candidates and then type its standard spelling for exactly 200 points per round. The Spelling Quiz tool runs entirely in the browser and asks you to perform two distinct tasks per round: first, look at four displayed entries and choose the only misspelled one; second, type that word's standard spelling from memory into a blank field. Each round awards its 200 points only after both steps succeed, so clearing all five rounds produces exactly 1,000. The detection stage tests whether you recognize an unusual form, while the correction stage tests whether you can produce the right letter sequence. Recognizing that a form looks wrong is often easier than writing the correct letters, and Spelling Quiz deliberately separates those two skills. No time pressure, no account, and no upload — every check happens in your own browser, and every standard spelling was verified against Princeton WordNet 3.1 and the Cambridge Dictionary before it entered the fixture.
How a Round Splits Into Detection and Correction
Each Spelling Quiz round is built around two distinct stages, and understanding that split is the key to a clean run. In the detection stage the game shows four candidate entries on screen. Three of them are real standard English words; one is a deliberately misspelled form. Your first job is to look at all four buttons, spot the entry whose letters look wrong, and select it with a touch, a click, or the arrow keys followed by Enter.
The correction stage begins only after the detection is confirmed. Once you have chosen the misspelled entry, the candidate buttons lock in place and a blank text field appears below. That field asks for the standard spelling — the form you would find in a modern dictionary. You type your best guess as a single uninterrupted sequence of letters and press Enter to submit. The game then compares what you typed against the verified standard form.
The two stages test different cognitive skills. Detection rewards pattern recognition: you read four words and notice the one whose letters do not look right. Correction rewards productive recall: with the misspelling locked in, you must produce the correct letter sequence from memory without any on-screen hint. Spelling Quiz refuses to award the 200 points for either stage alone, so a round only completes when both judgments agree.
| Aspect | Detection Stage | Correction Stage |
|---|---|---|
| What appears on screen | Four candidate buttons | One blank text field |
| Your action | Select the misspelled entry | Type the standard spelling |
| Input controls | Touch, pointer, or arrow keys + Enter | Physical keyboard + Enter to submit |
| Validation rule | Exactly one of the four is the intended misspelling | One ASCII word, lowercase after trim |
| Points awarded alone | None | None |
| Points awarded when both stages succeed | 200 for the round | 200 for the round |
Verified Misspellings, Standard Words, and the Round Fixture
Every word in Spelling Quiz is anchored to a published reference. The fixture was built by requiring each intended misspelling to be absent from the Princeton WordNet 3.1 index and each standard correction, plus every correctly spelled distractor, to be present as an exact indexed lemma. WordNet's machine-readable index gives the game a fixed boundary for "standard English" that does not depend on a developer's intuition about which letters look wrong.
To widen that boundary, the five standard corrections were also cross-checked live against the Cambridge Dictionary. Each correction URL returned an HTTP 200 response, and the downloaded page contained the expected headword. Combining the WordNet index check with the dictionary entry check makes it harder for an invented form or a historical variant to slip into the quiz.
Because the corrected form is deliberately absent from the four candidates, the detection stage cannot leak the answer beside the misspelled entry. The correct word never appears on screen during round play, so you cannot read it off a button — you have to know it. Correct positions also rotate across all four slots rather than always sitting in the same button, so pattern-matching by location will not help either.
- Every standard correction is an exact WordNet 3.1 lemma and a live Cambridge Dictionary entry.
- Every correctly spelled distractor is an exact WordNet 3.1 lemma.
- Every intended misspelling is absent from the WordNet 3.1 index.
- The corrected form is intentionally not among the four displayed candidates.
- The position of the misspelled entry varies across all four slots in the fixture.
200 Points per Round and How the Score Reaches 1,000
The score in Spelling Quiz is exact and additive, not time-based. A round contributes 200 points only when both stages — picking the misspelled entry and typing its standard correction — succeed. A correct detection alone is worth 0, and a typed correction alone is worth 0, because the second stage cannot even begin until the first stage is confirmed.
Because each of the five rounds behaves identically, clearing all five produces 200 + 200 + 200 + 200 + 200 = 1,000 points. The shared GameShell that hosts the quiz stores this best completed score in the browser when local storage is available, so a future session can recall your best finish on the same device. There are no bonus points, no streak multipliers, no time bonuses, and no partial credit — 1,000 is the only ceiling.
This strict accounting has a useful side effect: it makes the game's difficulty fully visible. You either finish five rounds of two-stage spelling work or you finish fewer. The score reads as a direct count of fully completed rounds multiplied by 200, which is why every summary you see for this game ends in the same five-digit figure.
Errors, Deadlocks, and the Restart Button
Spelling Quiz uses one deterministic error policy across both stages. Selecting a correctly spelled entry records a signature that contains the round number and the candidate index you clicked. Submitting a valid but incorrect correction records the round number and the normalized word you typed. Repeating the identical selection or the same correction with different letter case or surrounding spaces does not add a new error, because the same signature already exists in the run's history.
The first distinct error is recoverable. If you picked the wrong entry, you can try a different candidate. If you typed a wrong correction, you can edit the field and submit again. The run only deadlocks when you commit a second, different error — for example, picking a wrong entry after a wrong correction, or typing two distinct wrong corrections in the same round. At that point every game action freezes and the score is locked until you press Restart.
Invalid actions do not behave like real errors. Unknown arrow commands, fractional candidate indices, blank corrections, multiple-word inputs, apostrophes, hyphens, digits, accented letters, emoji, and punctuation are all rejected as atomic no-ops. They do not change the score, the error history, or the round progress. Restart itself is clean: it returns the quiz to round one, the first cursor position, no selection, zero score, a blank input, and an empty error log, so the next run starts identically to the first.
Touch, Keyboard, and Mobile Layout
Spelling Quiz is designed so that the same round can be played on a phone with one thumb, on a laptop with a trackpad, or on a desktop with a full keyboard. The four candidate entries are rendered as native buttons whose minimum height is greater than 44 pixels, so they comfortably meet the typical touch-target guideline. Words wrap inside their controls so a long entry cannot push the rest of the layout around, and the mobile layout stays in a single bounded column before expanding to two columns on wider screens.
Keyboard play covers the full round. The arrow keys move a visible highlight through the four entries and wrap around at the ends, so pressing Right on the last button jumps to the first. Enter selects the highlighted entry. After the misspelling is confirmed, focus moves into the text input, where typing fills the correction and Enter submits it through the form. A global shortcut deliberately ignores Enter that originated from a button or another input, which prevents duplicate submission when a touch event and a keyboard event fire close together.
Input normalization is narrow and predictable. The game trims leading and trailing whitespace and compares the remaining letters in lowercase, so capitalization and stray spaces cannot cause a wrong-but-right correction to be marked as correct. A valid correction must be one uninterrupted sequence of ASCII letters from a through z. Anything else — internal spaces, punctuation, digits, accented characters, or emoji — is rejected as an atomic no-op, so a correct answer embedded inside extra text cannot sneak through.
Play a Spelling Quiz Round in Six Steps
- Read all four candidate entries that appear on the round. Compare them as full words and look for the entry whose letters look unusual.
- Select that entry using a tap, a click, or the arrow keys followed by Enter. Once selected, the misspelled entry is confirmed and the candidate buttons lock.
- Type the standard spelling of the misspelled word into the blank text field that appears below. Use only ASCII letters with no internal spaces, hyphens, apostrophes, digits, or accented characters.
- Press Enter to submit the correction. If both your detection and your correction match the verified standard, the round awards 200 points and the next round opens.
- If your correction is rejected, retype a new candidate and press Enter again. You can keep trying until you either succeed or hit a second distinct error.
- Repeat steps one through five for all five rounds. Each successful round adds 200 points, and five clean rounds finish the run on exactly 1,000 points.
When the run ends — either by completing the fifth round or by triggering the second-distinct-error deadlock — press Restart to return to round one with a clean score, an empty error log, and the cursor back at the first candidate. The same six steps apply to every round, so the only thing that changes between attempts is which five misspelled entries you meet.
Boss Mode, Local Storage, and What the Quiz Doesn't Do
Spelling Quiz includes a discrete boss key alongside its Restart button. Press Escape twice within a short timing window and the quiz is replaced by a spreadsheet-like cover screen; press Escape twice again to bring the round back exactly as you left it. The boss key is a presentation aid for shared workspaces, not a cheat: it does not change the chosen entry, the typed correction, the recorded errors, or the score.
Every check the game performs runs locally in your browser. Typed text is never uploaded, no account is required, no paid service is called, and no package dependency is added. The shared GameShell saves the best completed score on the device when local storage is available, so the leaderboard-style summary you see is stored next to you rather than on a remote server.
Spelling Quiz is also clear about what it is not. It is fixed recreational spelling practice, not an adaptive literacy assessment, an educational diagnosis, a language certification, or a measure of intelligence. The five rounds do not adapt to your performance, the distractors do not get harder as you improve, and the score does not claim to predict real-world spelling ability. For readers who want to compare scoring systems across different word and language games, our guide on whether Hangman's 1,000-point score measures spelling ability offers a useful parallel.
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