Language tip of the week: useful

In this weekly microblog, we bring to English language learners more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, etc) which learners often find difficult.

This week’s language tip is about the spelling of useful and similar adjectives.

Although the adjective full ends with a double ‘l’, adjectives like useful have only one ‘l’:
✗ Find a more ~~usefull~~ spare time activity than driving around in a car.
✓ Find a more useful spare time activity than driving around in a car.
Other adjectives ending in -ful are also written with only one ‘l’, for example:
careful, faithful, harmful, helpful, meaningful, painful, powerful, skilful, successful
Note however that adverbs formed from these adjectives are written with double ‘l’, for example:
carefully, faithfully, helpfully, usefully etc.