Primary 4 spelling words: common suffixes

Primary 4 · 25 words · Updated 2026-09-16

1. careful
2. helpful
3. useful
4. cheerful
5. painful
6. careless
7. helpless
8. endless
9. hopeless
10. harmless
11. kindness
12. darkness
13. illness
14. sadness
15. weakness
16. movement
17. payment
18. treatment
19. argument
20. agreement
21. action
22. attention
23. direction
24. education
25. invention

How to practise these words

This list is really five short lists, and it is much easier learnt that way: do the five -ful words together, then the five -less words, and so on. The single most common mistake is writing "-full" with two letter l's, so it is worth saying out loud that the ending is always spelt with one, however full the word sounds. The -ment group holds the one word that breaks its own rule: "argument" loses the letter e that "argue" had, and a child who has just learnt "agreement" will want to keep it. The -tion words are the hardest to hear, because the ending sounds nothing like the letters that spell it, so treat that group as a sight pattern and practise it more often than the rest. Once a group is secure, try a word from outside the list with the same ending and see whether your child can build it.

Where these words come from

These are the five suffixes that appear most often in primary writing, with words chosen from public-domain frequency lists so that each root is one a Primary 4 child already knows. Nothing here is taken from a school's own spelling programme.