IELTS Spelling · Place names
Place names and addresses in IELTS Listening
When a place name matters, the recording usually spells it for you. That sounds like a gift, and it is — as long as you can take down letters at the speed somebody says them.
The short answer
Place names are rarely a vocabulary problem. They are a transcription problem: letters arriving faster than you can type them, and a handful of letters that sound alike down a microphone. Practise taking letters, not words.
Why the recording spells it out
The test is not trying to find out whether you know how a small English town is spelt. So when an unusual name is the answer, the speaker spells it: that’s Haverton — H-A-V-E-R-T-O-N. The mark is there for whoever is still writing when the letters stop.
Two habits make that easy. First, start writing at the first letter rather than waiting to see where it is going. Second, leave the letters as they are if you doubt one — a gap you can fix in the two minutes at the end is better than a guess you have forgotten you made.
The letters that sound alike
These are the pairs that go wrong, especially in a non-native speaker’s ear and especially at speed:
- M and N — the commonest error in the whole test.
- S and F, and S and X.
- B, P, V, D, E, G, T — the whole “ee” family, said quickly, is a minefield.
- I and Y, and A and 8 when letters and digits are mixed.
- “Double L”, “double T” — the word double means the letter twice, and it is easy to hear it as part of the name.
The address words
These are not spelled out, because they are assumed. Spell them without thinking:
Street, Road, Avenue, Lane, Drive, Close, Court, Place, Square, Crescent, Terrace, Gardens, Park, Way.
Avenue and Crescent are the two that get mangled. And if the answer is a full address, write the number and the word the way an address is written: 14 Hill Road.
British place-name endings
If the recording is British, a town name may end in one of a small set of endings that are never spelt the way they are said:
- -shire, said -sher: Hampshire, Yorkshire.
- -borough and -brough, both said roughly -bruh: Peterborough, Middlesbrough.
- -cester, said -ster: Leicester, Gloucester.
- -mouth, said -muth: Plymouth, Bournemouth.
You will not be asked to produce these from memory. But recognising the shape means that when the letters come, you are confirming something rather than inventing it.
Capitals
Place names take a capital letter. Write them that way, including the Street or Road that follows.
Practise these
The trainer dictates the address words and a set of place names in the accent you pick, and shows you letter by letter where a word went wrong — which, for this group, is exactly the feedback you need.
Practise place names by dictation
The Spelling trainer says a word once, in the accent you pick, and checks what you typed letter by letter — then gives you back only the words you missed.
Open the Spelling trainer →Three days free opens every test — Listening, Reading, Writing and Spelling — plus Vocabulary and Grammar in the app.
Questions people ask
Will the recording always spell an unusual name?
If an unusual proper noun is the answer, it is normally spelled out, because the test is not checking whether you have memorised British town names. Common words in an address are not spelled out, which is why those are the ones to learn.
Do I have to use a capital letter for a street name?
Write it the way an address is written, with capitals. It is normal English and it removes any doubt.
What if I miss a letter while they are spelling?
Leave the gap and keep going rather than stopping to reconstruct it — the letters do not wait. You get two minutes at the end of the computer-delivered test to come back to it.
The other five groups
- Numbers and dates — Phone numbers, prices, times, reference codes and the date — the Part 1 answers that are lost to a digit, not to English.
- Days and months — Wednesday, February, Tuesday and Thursday — twelve words and seven words, and a surprising number of lost marks.
- Personal names — Surnames spelled aloud, hyphens, apostrophes, and the letters that sound the same at speed.
- Plurals — The missing s, the words that are already plural, and the gap that has to agree with the sentence around it.
- Double letters — Accommodation, necessary, committee, occurred — the words where the only question is how many of each letter.
And the whole picture, with the marking rule and the accents, is on the Spelling trainer page. The words themselves come out of the Listening tests, which run in the computer-delivered interface here.
The marking rule — "words with spelling errors in the Reading and Listening tests will be marked as incorrect" — is IDP’s own wording on How to improve your spelling and Common spelling mistakes, both checked 2 October 2026; the same pages say British and American spellings are both accepted as long as you stay consistent. "You will hear the recordings once only" is from the official IELTS Listening format page, checked 2 October 2026. The two minutes to check at the end of the computer-delivered test, and the fact that the screen has no spell-check, are per the British Council’s paper versus computer guidance, checked 2 October 2026. The six groups of words below are how this trainer organises practice, not an official list. IELTS Computer is not affiliated with IDP, British Council or Cambridge.