Suffixes -ance and -ence Word Search

DISTANCE or DISTENCE? SILENCE or SILANCE? The -ance and -ence suffixes sound identical in speech, and choosing between them is one of the trickiest spelling decisions in upper KS2. The honest answer: there is no fully reliable rule. The eyes have to learn this one.

This word search contains seven -ance words and eight -ence words, designed for Year 5 and Year 6 pupils, and for fourth and fifth grade readers in the US. Seeing both endings together in one grid helps children notice the visual difference between A and E in this position — even when their ears can’t. Larger grid, words left-to-right and top-to-bottom only.

DISTANCE · ENTRANCE · BALANCE · AMBULANCE · GUIDANCE · INSTANCE · TOLERANCE · PRESENCE · SILENCE · SENTENCE · ABSENCE · PATIENCE · EVIDENCE · AUDIENCE · VIOLENCE

When spelling cannot rely on sound

The -ance and -ence suffixes both make abstract nouns — distant becomes DISTANCE, silent becomes SILENCE, patient becomes PATIENCE. They behave just like -ness from S39 (turning a quality into a noun you can think about), but their unstressed vowel collapses into a schwa, the muddy “uh” sound that all unstressed vowels make. So both endings sound exactly like “-uns”. The ears cannot help.

A loose pattern does exist, and it’s worth giving children: words whose adjective form ends in -ant tend to take -ance (DISTANT → DISTANCE, TOLERANT → TOLERANCE), and words whose adjective form ends in -ent take -ence (SILENT → SILENCE, PATIENT → PATIENCE). Pairs travel together. This is why S64 (which covers the adjectives) pairs directly with this puzzle — learn one and the other tells itself. But not every -ance/-ence word has a partner adjective in modern English (AMBULANCE has no AMBULANT in everyday use), so the rule helps for many words and stays silent for a few. Familiarity does the rest.

Five words to lock into memory

1. SILENCE keeps its E from SILENT. Write SILENT above SILENCE and ask your child to spot what stayed (the E before the suffix). The adjective tells the noun how to dress: -ent partners with -ence.
2. DISTANCE inherits its A from DISTANT. Same trick, opposite ending. The adjective DISTANT has -ant, the noun gets -ance. A pair like this is two spellings learned at once.
3. AMBULANCE has no adjective partner. Write AMBULANT? Not in everyday use. Tell your child: this word just has to be known. Some words don’t fit the rule — and being honest about which ones don’t is the rule’s real friend.
4. SENTENCE looks like SILENCE. Two -ence words side by side. The -tence ending is doing the same job: turning the verb SENT (originally “to feel”) into the noun for a feeling-expressed-as-words. Word histories rarely make spelling intuitive, but they often make it memorable.
5. EVIDENCE belongs to detectives. Ask your child what evidence they would gather to solve a tiny mystery — a missing toy, a half-eaten biscuit. Then point at the spelling: -ence. Adjective form? EVIDENT (-ent). Pair confirmed.

Three ways to sort -ance from -ence

As an adjective-finding starter. Write the fifteen grid words on the board, then ask the class to supply each one’s adjective partner where one exists. DISTANCE → DISTANT, SILENCE → SILENT, TOLERANCE → TOLERANT, PATIENCE → PATIENT. The adjective endings sort the noun spellings automatically. Some words (AMBULANCE, AUDIENCE) have no everyday adjective partner — mark them as “memorise these directly”. The starter teaches the rule and its exceptions in one go.

As a two-column sort in pairs. Pairs sort all fifteen grid words into -ance and -ence columns, then write the adjective beside each (where one exists). The visual columns make the choice between A and E tangible — they’re seeing the spellings stack vertically, which is where the pattern becomes visible.

One-to-one at home. For home educators, run a tiny editing exercise: take a paragraph from a news article and circle every word ending in -ance or -ence. There will be several — newspapers rely on abstract nouns. Your child decides whether each spelling is right (it always is in published writing) and identifies the adjective partner where they can. Editing real prose with a spelling target on is professional vocabulary work performed at home.

What comes next

• Suffixes -ant and -ent word search — the adjective partners of -ance and -ence
• Prefixes auto-, ex-, trans- word search — the previous puzzle in this series
• All spelling word searches — the full series from foundation phonics to Year 6

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