What are common exception words? (Year 1 and 2 lists)

What are common exception words?

Common exception words are high-frequency words that do not follow the usual phonics patterns a child has been taught, so they cannot be fully sounded out and have to be partly learned by sight. Words like the, said, was and friend are the classic examples. The Department for Education sets them out in the National Curriculum (English Appendix 1), with a statutory list for Year 1 and a longer one for Year 2.

The name is a little misleading. These words are not random, and they are not fully irregular. Most of each word behaves exactly as phonics predicts, and usually only one part is the exception. That matters for how you teach them, which we come to below.

Why do common exception words matter so much?

They matter because they are everywhere. The common exception words include most of the highest-frequency words in written English, the ones a child uses in almost every sentence they write. If a child can spell them without thinking, their attention is free for ideas and sentences. If they cannot, spelling keeps interrupting the writing, which is one reason weak transcription holds writing back (we cover that in why KS2 writing stays low).

So although each word looks small, getting these automatic early pays off across everything a child writes.

The Year 1 common exception words (full list)

There are 45 common exception words in the Year 1 statutory list. These are the DfE words your child is expected to read and spell by the end of Year 1:

a, are, ask, be, by, come, do, friend, full, go, has, he, here, his, house, I, is, love, me, my, no, of, once, one, our, pull, push, put, said, says, school, she, so, some, the, there, they, to, today, was, we, were, where, you, your.

You can practise these with audio and example sentences on our free Year 1 common exception words list.

The Year 2 common exception words

Year 2 adds a longer list, over 60 more words, and they get harder. This is where children meet because, beautiful, could, should, would, many, people, every, great and whole, alongside pattern families like find, kind, mind, behind and old, cold, gold, told.

Grouping them by their shared tricky part, as those families show, makes them far easier than learning 60 unrelated words one at a time. The full set, with audio and sentences, is on our Year 2 common exception words list.

How do I help my child learn them?

The trick is to stop treating these words as random strings to memorise, and start pointing at the one part that is genuinely unusual. Four things make the biggest difference:

1. Spot the tricky part. In said, the s and d are regular; only the middle is odd. Point at just that bit, so there is one small thing to remember rather than a whole word.
2. Practise from memory, not by copying. Cover the word and have your child write it from memory, then check. Recalling a word builds a much stronger memory than copying it out. We explain why in how to help your child remember spellings.
3. Little and often. Three or four short goes across a week beat one long session, and bringing a word back a day or two later makes it stick.
4. Use it in a sentence. Meeting a word in context builds a stronger memory than drilling it in isolation, and it is closer to how your child will actually use it.

None of this needs to take long. Five minutes, a few times a week, on the handful of words your child does not yet know, does more than a long Sunday-night session on the whole list.

Where a spelling app helps

The common exception words are exactly the kind of thing a good app handles well: a fixed, known list, practised through short retrieval sessions, with the tricky words brought back until they stick. That is what SpellCast is built around. It loads the statutory lists (Reception to Year 6), reads every word aloud inside an example sentence in a natural British voice, and keeps returning the words your child gets wrong. A single class can use it free, and families can start free too. Our free spelling resources and word lists cover the same words with no login if you would rather practise on paper.

The short version

Common exception words are the high-frequency words that do not follow the usual phonics rules, set out by the DfE for Year 1 (45 words) and Year 2 (over 60 more). They are worth getting automatic early, because they turn up in almost everything a child writes. The way to do it is not rote copying but spotting the one tricky part, recalling the word from memory, and practising little and often. Get those in place and the rest of a child's writing has more room to breathe.

Source

• Department for Education (2013). English Appendix 1: Spelling. National Curriculum in England (sets the statutory Year 1 and Year 2 common exception word lists).