5th Grade spelling
5th Grade Words Ending in Ant and Ent
Words ending in ant and ent: important, different, assistant, excellent, accident. Play hangman with the list or print a worksheet with answers.
Read the spelling list
The pattern: The partner endings to ance and ence: important goes with importance, different with difference.
Ant and ent are the partner endings to ance and ence, and they sound the same: a weak /unt/. They form adjectives and nouns that name a person or a quality, such as assistant, participant, immigrant, resident, and president. The writer cannot hear which letter to use, so the only dependable method is to learn the word, or to check its noun partner: importance goes with important, difference with different.
Both groups appear on this list. The ant group includes significant, assistant, relevant, elegant, immigrant and participant. The ent group includes different, independent, excellent, accident, permanent, confident, resident and incident. Fifth graders see these words in nonfiction and in their own persuasive writing, where adjectives like significant, different and excellent carry the argument. A fair share are among the most often misspelled words in school writing.
30 entries. Our solver needed 0.7 wrong guesses on average: 27 easy, 3 medium and 0 hard. The toughest is consultant (2 misses), the quickest significant (0).
-ant
- significant Easy · 0
- assistant Easy · 1
- relevant Easy · 1
- lieutenant Easy · 0
- dominant Easy · 1
- consultant Medium · 2
- elephant Easy · 0
- ignorant Easy · 1
- immigrant Easy · 1
- resistant Easy · 0
- defendant Easy · 1
- irrelevant Easy · 0
- elegant Easy · 1
- reluctant Easy · 1
- participant Easy · 0
-ent
- different Medium · 2
- independent Easy · 0
- excellent Easy · 0
- accident Medium · 2
- permanent Easy · 0
- incident Easy · 1
- equivalent Easy · 1
- consistent Easy · 0
- innocent Easy · 1
- confident Easy · 1
- efficient Easy · 0
- subsequent Easy · 1
- resident Easy · 0
- prominent Easy · 1
- apparent Easy · 1
Words worth a closer look
- significantSignificance is the partner noun, which shows the ant ending. Students often write significent.
- differentDifference shows ent. A frequent error is differant, which follows the sound.
- excellentDoubled l in the middle, ent at the end. Students sometimes write excelent or excellant.
- assistantAssistance shows ant. One of the few words with a double s near the end.
- accidentNo ance or ence partner, so this one is simply learned. The cc is a common stumbling block.
Teaching it
Show the noun partner first. Assistance, significance, relevance and elegance all lead back to ant, while difference, independence, confidence and residence lead to ent. Not every word has a partner, so those words are simply learned. Common errors are swapping the vowel (significent, differant) and doubling a letter that does not need it, as in excelent.
For hangman, tell players the word ends in ant or ent and let them argue it out with the noun partner. The last letter is the hardest to guess, so keep it for last. Print the worksheet as a two-column sort and have students write the matching ance or ence noun beside each word.
Print a 5th Grade Words Ending in Ant and Ent worksheet
Eight puzzles on one US Letter page, with a clue, letter blanks, an empty frame to draw in, an alphabet strip to cross off and circles to count misses. Page two is the answer key.
Need another sheet?
Draw eight different words from this list, right here. Same layout, new answer key.
Keep going
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