Find the correctly spelled word meaning having a harmful effect.

Correct — A. Deleterious means causing harm or damage, as in a deleterious effect on health.

Spell it in chunks: DELE + TE + RIOUS. That gives three e's before the r, then the i of -rious → option (a).

A memory hook, not an etymology: the word opens with the six letters of delete and ends like serious.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  Deliterious — Deliterious turns the second e into an i. That vowel is weak in speech, which makes the slip easy, but the word opens dele-, as delete does.
• (c)
  Deleterous — Deleterous drops the i before -ous. The ending is -rious, as in serious and various, not a bare -rous.
• (d)
  Deletrious — Deletrious drops the e between t and r. That e carries the stressed syllable, del-i-TEER-ee-us, so it cannot go.

A spelling item on a long word tests the vowels you barely hear. In deleterious the stress falls on TEER, so the vowels around it blur in speech.

Fix them by chunks. Dele holds two e's, te holds the stressed e, and -rious keeps its i, as in serious and curious.

Each wrong option breaks one chunk: an i for an e in the first, a missing e in the second, a missing i in the third.

Key facts

• Deleterious means causing harm or damage.
• It is spelt D-E-L-E-T-E-R-I-O-U-S, eleven letters.
• It comes from Greek dēlētērios, 'noxious', and is not related to delete.
• The stress falls on the third syllable: del-i-TEER-ee-us.

Common traps

• Writing -rous for -rious, as in Deleterous, because the i is barely sounded
• Writing i for the second e, as in Deliterious, because that vowel is weak in speech

No directly related past PYQ was found.