Best Free Spelling Apps and Websites in 2026: What Is Truly Free

Search for a free spelling app and you will find dozens that say "free" on the download button. Open them and the picture changes. One lets you practice ten words and then asks for a card. Another is free for seven days. A third is free forever but plays an advertisement between every round, and a fourth is genuinely free and genuinely excellent, if you are willing to spend an evening setting it up.

None of that is dishonest, exactly, but it makes comparison hard. This guide sorts the best-known spelling tools by what you can actually use without paying, for how long, and with what catch. Every entry was checked against the company's own site or app store listing in late September and early October 2026. Free plans change more often than paid ones, so look again before you build a habit around one.

We make one of the tools below, and it appears here as one entry among the others, with its limits stated plainly.

The four kinds of "free"

It helps to name the categories before the list, because the word covers very different deals.

Free, full stop. No payment, no ads, no time limit. These are rare. Open-source projects and tools run by non-profits or large organizations make up most of them.

Free with ads. Everything works, and the site pays for itself with advertising. That is a fair trade for many adults, and a more awkward one for young children.

Free plan, paid upgrade. Often called freemium. A useful core stays free for good, and you pay for more volume or more features. The question is whether the free part is enough to make progress, or only enough to make you want the rest.

Free trial. This is not free. It is a paid product you can try first, usually for seven to thirty days. Trials are worth taking, but they belong in a different column.

The short version

Truly free: Anki and Word Club

Anki is the strongest free spelling tool there is, and also the least friendly. It is an open-source flashcard program with excellent spaced repetition, including FSRS, an optional modern scheduler, since version 23.10. It is free on Windows, Mac and Linux, and AnkiDroid is free on Android. Only the iPhone app, AnkiMobile, costs money: $24.99, once, with no subscription.

To use it for spelling, you make cards that play a word's audio and ask you to type it, and Anki then compares your answer letter by letter. That takes some template editing the first time. Once it is set up, you have a spaced-repetition dictation trainer for any words you like, for nothing.

Word Club is the official app of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, free on iPhone, iPad and Android. It covers the season's School Spelling Bee Study List and Words of the Champions, the 4,000-word study list the bee recommends for classroom through regional spelling bees, with five spelling play modes and three vocabulary modes. The free download includes all 4,000 study words for the season. It is aimed at competitors, so the words get hard quickly, but any adult who enjoys difficult vocabulary will find it a good free challenge. Some of its modes lean toward recognizing spellings rather than producing them, so make sure you also spend time in the modes where you type the word.

Free and good for young children

Duolingo ABC is a separate app from the language course, made for children from preschool to about second grade. It teaches letters, letter sounds, phonics and early sight words through short lessons and tracing. It has no ads and no in-app purchases, which makes it one of the very few children's literacy apps that is free in the full sense. Spelling comes along as part of phonics rather than as dictation, which is exactly right for the age. A confident seven-year-old reader will outgrow it.

SpellingTraining.com is a free, ad-supported website for grades one to four. You type in a list, and the site reads each word aloud for the child to type, then shows the result. It also has simple games. The site itself notes that the phone version is limited and the full version runs on a computer. For a family that just needs this week's school list read aloud and checked, it costs nothing and works.

Free with a limit

Vocabulary.com gives you a free account with its dictionary, its word lists and 10 questions a day in its adaptive trainer. Each word list has a Spelling Bee activity that shows the definition, plays the word and asks you to type it. Spelling is a side feature of the site, but it is real listen-and-type practice and costs nothing to try.

Spelling Shed has a free tier with basic games, and many children already have a login through school. Its full curriculum and home plans are priced by quote. If your child's class uses it, ask the teacher for home access before paying for anything else.

Merriam-Webster.com deserves a place even though it is not a spelling course. Every entry has an audio pronunciation, and checking a word you are unsure of, then hearing it said, is one of the oldest and best spelling habits there is. The free site carries ads.

Our free plan, and Grammarly

We should explain our own entry, since it is a mix of trial and free plan. Every account starts with 14 days of everything. After that, the free plan continues for good, with no ads: every review the scheduler sets you, plus three new words a day at your own level. A recorded American voice says the word, you type it, and you see exactly which letters went wrong and why, with the word's meaning and an example sentence. The cap on new words is the honest catch. Three a day is roughly 90 new words a month, which is a sensible pace for lasting learning but slow if you have an exam in three weeks. Pro removes the cap for $95 a year or $15 a month.

Grammarly's free plan checks spelling and basic grammar as you write in email, documents and the browser. It is a useful safety net. It will not teach you to spell, because it fixes the word for you before you have tried to recall it, and it can miss real words used in the wrong place, such as "their" for "there".

What free tools usually leave out

The pattern across free tools is consistent. Most give you the exercise, hear a word and type it, but leave the schedule to you. That matters more than it sounds. Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues, reviewing hundreds of experiments in 2006, found that practice spread over days beats the same practice in one sitting, and John Dunlosky and colleagues, in a 2013 review of study techniques, rated spaced practice and practice testing as the two most effective methods they studied.

A free tool without a schedule can still work. You just have to be the schedule.

The oldest way to do that costs nothing at all. The Leitner box, a card-box method popularized by the German science writer Sebastian Leitner in his 1972 book So lernt man lernen, uses a few compartments. A word you get right moves to the next compartment and comes back less often; a word you miss goes back to the first and comes back tomorrow. Our guide on how a spacing algorithm decides when you see a word again explains how apps automate the same idea.

How to choose a free option

Decide first who is practicing. A young child learning letter sounds needs Duolingo ABC, not a spelling quiz. A child with a weekly school list needs a site that reads the list aloud, such as SpellingTraining.com. An adult or teenager who wants long-term improvement needs dictation plus spacing, which means Anki if you will set it up, or a free plan that runs the schedule for you if you will not.

Then decide what you will tolerate. Ads are fine for some households and a dealbreaker in others. Setup time is fine for some adults and a guaranteed way to never start for others. Be honest about which one you are.

Finally, judge any tool by one result. Write down ten words you missed in the first session, and spell them from memory two weeks later. A free tool that passes that check is worth more than a paid one that does not.

A method that costs nothing

You can build a complete spelling practice with no app at all. Collect your own problem words, using our twenty-minute self-audit if you need a starting list. Each day, have someone read five words aloud, or record yourself saying them and play the recording back. Write each word from memory, check it at once, and mark the exact letters you got wrong.

Words you get right move on to be checked again in a few days, then a week. Words you miss come back tomorrow. Ten minutes is plenty, and our daily spelling routine gives a structure for it. The apps in this guide save you time and organize the schedule, but the method itself has always been free.

What to do next

Choose one free option from the table that fits who is practicing, and use it for a few minutes on five days this week. Note ten words that went wrong in the first session, and check them again in two weeks. If you would like to try listen-and-type practice with the review schedule handled for you, you can try five words on the home page with no sign-up, and the pricing page shows exactly what Spelling.School's free plan includes.

For a broader comparison that includes paid tools, see our guide to spelling websites and apps for teens, adults and English learners.

Questions people ask

What is the best free spelling app?

For adults and teenagers, Anki is the strongest free option, because it combines type-the-word practice with excellent spaced repetition, though it takes some setup. For spelling bee words, the official Word Club app from the Scripps National Spelling Bee is free. For young children learning letters and sounds, Duolingo ABC is free with no ads and no in-app purchases.

Is Anki really free?

Yes, on most devices. Anki is free and open source on Windows, Mac and Linux, and AnkiDroid is free on Android. The official iPhone and iPad app, AnkiMobile, costs $24.99 as a one-time purchase, which helps fund the project. There are no subscriptions and no ads.

Are there free spelling websites with no ads?

A few. Duolingo ABC is free with no ads, though it is an app for young children rather than a website. Anki has no ads on any device. Some products with free plans, including ours, run without advertising on the free tier, while many free spelling websites for children, such as SpellingTraining.com, are supported by ads.

Is the Scripps Word Club app free?

Yes. Word Club is the official study app of the Scripps National Spelling Bee and is free to download on iPhone, iPad and Android. It covers the season's school study list and Words of the Champions, with several spelling and vocabulary modes. Its App Store listing says the free download includes all 4,000 study words for the 2026-2027 season.

Can I learn spelling for free without an app?

Yes. Collect the words you actually misspell, have someone read them aloud or record yourself, and write each word from memory, checking it straight away. Review missed words the next day and correct ones a few days later, then a week later. A simple card box with a few compartments can run this schedule on paper.

What is the difference between a free plan and a free trial?

A free trial gives you the full paid product for a limited time, often seven to thirty days, after which you pay or lose access. A free plan continues for as long as you use it, usually with limits on features or volume. Both are worth using, but only a free plan is a long-term free option.

Fix the words you actually get wrong

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