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.
Here's a pattern every parent of a KS2 child has seen: the Friday list arrives with "ominous," "conscience" and "environment" on it, the child drills the letters all week, scrapes the test - and a month later can neither spell the words nor tell you what any of them mean. The letters never had anything to stick to.
The research on this is unambiguous and so is classroom experience: children remember the spellings of words they understand far better than strings they've memorised blind. Meaning is the hook. Yet almost every spelling app - ours included, until now - practised only the letters. Word Meanings is the missing half: a short activity that takes this week's spelling list and asks, word by word, do you actually know what this means?
Two questions per word
Each word in the round gets asked about twice, because knowing a word has two halves:
- "Which word means this?" A definition appears - the same carefully written clue the practice screen uses, which by design never contains the word itself - and your child taps the right word from the round.
- "Which word fills the gap?" The word's own example sentence appears with the word removed, and they tap the word that belongs in it. Reading the sentence's grammar and sense to place the word is a genuinely different skill from recognising a definition - which is exactly why both are asked.
Everything is a tap - no typing, no dragging, no timer. It looks and feels like the practice screen (the same option buttons as Pick it), not like one of the arcade games, because that's what it is: a learning activity that happens to be fun, not a game wearing school clothes.
The clever bit is where the wrong answers come from
Most vocabulary quizzes generate distractors, and generated distractors are either laughably far away or subtly wrong in ways nobody checked. Word Meanings does something simpler and better: the wrong answers are the other words in the round - this week's own list. If the list is "achieve, ancient, conscience, environment," then the question about "conscience" offers exactly the words your child is most likely to genuinely confuse it with this week. The activity gets its difficulty from the list itself, which means nothing is generated, nothing can be wrong, and the confusions it probes are the real ones.
How close those wrong answers sit is a dial, and by default the app sets it from your child's own level - the same level that picks their Skills Check words - so an eleven-year-old gets near-misses without anyone configuring anything. At the closest setting, the options can include real inflected forms of the target itself: "achieve," "achieved," "achieving," where only the sentence's grammar settles it. Every one of those forms is checked against a real dictionary before it's ever shown - a made-up word is never put in front of a child as if it were real. You can override the level per activity in the Learning plan's ⚙ settings.
What it deliberately does not do
Word Meanings never touches your child's spelling accuracy figures - and this is a feature, not a gap. Tapping the right definition is not a spelling attempt: the child never produces a letter. If we counted it, a child could appear to "spell" beautifully without spelling anything, and the progress report you rely on would quietly stop meaning what it says. So the results are recorded in their own lane - you'll see them on a word's detail in the progress report, labelled as Word meanings - and the spelling accuracy number stays what it has always been: how your child actually spells.
That honesty rule runs right through this season's releases: the aid ladder records helped answers as helped, Word Parts counts only because building a word really is spelling it, and Word Meanings doesn't count because tapping a meaning isn't. The numbers a parent sees should never flatter.
Where it fits in the week
Word Meanings is free, works for both age bands, and slots into the weekly Learning plan like any other activity. Our favourite placement: early in the week, before the heavy spelling practice. Meet the meanings on Monday, and every practice session after it is spelling words the child actually knows - which is when the letters finally have something to stick to.