Select the correctly spelt word to fill in the blank. My mother said that every relationship must have some amount of ___________.

Correct — B. flexibility is the noun built from the adjective flexible, and the word reaches English from Latin flectere, to bend, through flexibilis. A Latin root means the /f/ sound is written with an f, never with ph.

Adjectives ending in -ble form their nouns by replacing -le with -ility: flexible gives flexibility, possible gives possibility, visible gives visibility.

Option (b) is the spelling that keeps both the f and the -ibility ending.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  flexebelity — flexebelity puts e where i belongs, twice — once in the stem and once in the suffix. The ending is -ibility, so both vowels are wrong.
• (c)
  phlexibility — The ending is right, but ph for the /f/ sound belongs to Greek borrowings such as physics and philosophy. Flexible is Latin, so it is spelt with f.
• (d)
  flaxibilety — flax is a different word altogether, the fibre plant. The suffix is wrong too, with -ilety in place of -ility.

Spelling items of this kind attack two soft points at once.

One is the unstressed vowel. In flexibility the i of the stem and the i of -ility are both reduced in speech to the same neutral sound, so pronunciation gives you no help in choosing between i and e.

The other is the consonant spelling of /f/. English writes that sound as f in words of Latin origin and as ph in words taken from Greek, so the origin of the word decides the letter.

Key facts

• Flexible comes from Latin flexibilis, from flectere meaning to bend.
• Adjectives ending in -ble form abstract nouns in -bility: possible gives possibility, responsible gives responsibility.
• The /f/ sound is spelt ph mainly in words of Greek origin, such as physics, phase and philosophy.

Common traps

• Saying the options aloud, when flexebelity and flexibility sound almost identical
• Assuming a long formal word must take the more elaborate ph spelling

No directly related past PYQ was found.