The major purpose of this study was to determine, from an analysis of the misspellings, some of the difficulties experienced by children in spelling 4140 common words. Five elementary schools in three states were selected for the study. One classroom unit for every grade level from 3 to 6 from each school were chosen for the study. Misspellings of 4140 words from the spellings of 498,177 running words by 479 pupils were analyzed. Findings include: (1) Slightly more than 10 percent of the words caused problems for more than 40 percent of the pupils; (2) Specific areas of difficulty were experienced by at least 25 percent of the pupils misspelling a given word approximately 71 percent of the time; (3) Less than 25 percent of the pupils misspelled the same letter combinations; (4) 27.8 percent of the words, minus the words misspelled by only one pupil, were misspelled in exactly the same way by at least 40 percent of the pupils; and (5) There was a high incidence of a homonym being given for a spelling word. Based on the results, five specific recommendations for instruction are presented. (Author/JF)