Drafted with AI assistance and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by hand before publishing - see our AI transparency page for how we use AI across the app.
Spelling.Live was built in the UK, for UK schools, and until this week it was British English by construction. That is fine when your child's school teaches favourite. It is not fine when their school teaches favorite, which is what a parent in the United States told us - politely, in an App Store review, after the app took the list they had typed and changed it.
What was actually happening
Every word saved to a list ran through a spelling checker before anything else. That checker held a list of American spellings and swapped each one for its British form. A parent typing their child's real school list got a note afterwards saying "We changed favorite → favourite to the British spelling." - and a single Got it button. There was no Keep. There was no setting to turn it off.
So a child in the US was then tested, all week, on a spelling their school had never taught them, because we had decided we knew better. Looking at our own database, this had happened to five households. It should have happened to none.
The question we should have been asking
From this week, adding a child asks one more thing: "Which English does their school use?" - with four answers.
- 🇬🇧 UK English (colour, favourite) - preselected, and what every existing child already is
- 🇺🇸 US English (color, favorite)
- 🇦🇺 Australian English (colour, favourite)
- 🇮🇳 Indian English (colour, favourite)
It is a per-child setting, not a per-account one, because a tutor can have a pupil in Surrey and a pupil in San Diego, and a family can move. Your answer for one child pre-fills the question for the next child you add on the same device, so adding three children is not three decisions.
You can change it any time afterwards: the child's card → Settings → About them → "Which English does their school use?", right beside their name, pronoun and school year.
What changes when a child is set to US English
Their words save exactly as they typed them. No rewriting, no correction note. Favorite stays favorite.
A British spelling gets a question, not a correction. If colour lands on a US child's list, the list still saves in full and a short note asks about that one word - "our checker thinks 'colour' looks like the British spelling - but it is often wrong. Keep it if it is right for your child" - with Keep it and Remove it. That is the same two-tier rule we have used since August: genuinely unsafe words are blocked outright, and spelling opinions are questions the parent answers.
Photographed lists are read as written. The AI that reads a photo of a school spelling list used to be told to use British spellings, which meant it could "correct" a US child's homework sheet on the way in. It now reads the sheet in the child's own English.
Lists we generate follow suit too. Ask for a list on a topic, or use "Suggest from progress", and a US child gets American spellings back.
And in the other direction, the correction note a UK child's parent sees now carries one extra line: "Teaching US spellings? Switch this child to US English in their settings and we will keep the words as you type them." The note that caused the complaint is now the thing that points at the fix.
UK stays the default, deliberately
Nothing changed for families already using the app. UK English is what a child with no answer resolves to, it is what is preselected, and the British spelling checker behaves exactly as it did before. The National Curriculum word lists, the curriculum coverage report and the recorded British audio are all untouched.
Five corrections went in alongside, which help UK families as much as anyone: program, curb, check, practice and license are no longer rewritten. Every one of them is an ordinary British word - a computer program, to curb your enthusiasm, to check an answer, a doctor's practice, to license a premises - so turning them into programme, kerb, cheque, practise and licence was not correcting a spelling, it was swapping in a different word.
Australian and Indian English use British spellings, so picking either of those changes nothing about your child's word lists today. What they will change, once the work below lands, is the voice - and after that the school-year labels, so an Australian parent sees Foundation and Year 1 rather than Reception.
What has not changed yet, honestly
The voice is still British for everyone. Every recorded word, sentence and phonics clip is British English, read by a British voice, and that is what a US child hears today. So are the example sentences and the crossword-style clues.
That is not an oversight, it is the order of work. Audio and sentences belong to a word in our database, and until this week a word had exactly one of each - so giving American children American audio would have meant overwriting the British audio for every British child. Storing both is the next piece of work, and it is under way. When it lands, a child set to US English will get an American voice and American wording, and a child set to Australian English will get an Australian voice with the same British spellings.
The one part that already follows the setting: when a word has no recorded clip and your device reads it aloud instead, it now uses a voice in your child's English.
If it happened to you
If a word on your list was changed and you would rather it had not been: switch that child to their English in Settings → About them, then re-add the affected word exactly as you type it. It will save as typed from then on.
We have left the already-saved words alone rather than editing anyone's lists behind their back. If you would like us to put your original spelling back, or to switch a whole class over in one go rather than child by child, say so through the Feedback button and we will do it.
If your child's school spells it differently from us, we would rather know than guess. The help centre has more, and the Feedback button in the app comes straight to me.