Spelling.School · How to spell

How to spell responsibilities

hear it/rɪ,spɑnsə'bɪlɪti/nounSchwa and roots

What it means: Duties or tasks that a person is expected to do.

In a sentence: Sara learned to take care of her pet as one of her responsibilities.

The part people get wrong

Watch for an unstressed vowel that is hard to hear, and the order of ie. Often misspelled as responsibilites or responbilities.

Same family: responsible, irresponsible, responsibly, responsiveness, respond. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Responsibilities” comes from the Latin root ‘respondere,’ meaning ‘to answer.’ Over time, the word shifted from the idea of answering for something to the modern sense of having duties and obligations you must ‘answer’ for.

Patterns it uses: The unstressed vowel (schwa) · Prefixes keep every letter

Try spelling it

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