With almost two decades of experience teaching ESL learners, many, including Arab students show difficulties with English spelling. Spelling errors seriously hamper their word construction affecting their overall writing proficiency. Also, these poor spellers demonstrate comprehension difficulties. In this study, undergraduate students have been selected. The purpose of this study is to identify the types of their spelling errors and to investigate the magnitude of spelling problem /p/ and /b/ in an ESP context. To answer the first inquiry, a small experimental study of tertiary level female students (n = 40) spelling errors were collected and analyzed from compositions written in class. The frequency of spelling errors was categorized according to their types.To answer the second inquiry, a longitudinal study conducted across five batches to a benchmarking question from the mid-semester exams in the ‘Medical Terminology’ course was scrutinized. Results show that the frequency of spelling errors in students’ written production is high. It demonstrates that little attention is given to this problem in the secondary level of education. As a matter of urgency, it is thus crucial for instructors and stakeholders to scrutinize this problem before it gets ‘fossilized’.