04 June 2012

Spelling bee words

When the Scripps National Spelling Bee was held last week, I was impressed by the difficulty of the words selected for the competition.  Granted, this was the championship round, but still...

As reported in a live blog in the Washington Post, these were some of the words:
ajimez
luteovirescent
admittatur
guetapens
ericeticolous
porwigle
sylloge
tendenz
podilegous
Out of curiosity, I looked up the winning words from previous competitions.  From the 1980s and 90s:
antipyretic
xanthosis
sarcophagus
psoriasis
Purim
luge
milieu
staphylococci
From the 1960s and 70s
sycophant
eczema
Chihuahua
abalone
croissant
vouchsafe
narcolepsy
And finally, from the 1920s and 1930s:
gladiolus
cerise
albumen
fracas
knack
torsion
intelligible
sanitarium
It's apparent that ever-more obscure and difficult words are becoming necessary to determine the champion.

6 comments:

  1. One of my acquaintances competed in this year's spelling bee. She got out in the third round.

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  2. Yup - I knew all the words from the earlier examples and only podilegous from the recent set.

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  3. Its not so much a spelling bee as aan obscure words bee. I wonder if the finalists could define the words as well?

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  4. You have to laugh, don't you? With modern standards of spelling so low due to our education system that no longer emphasises the three R's, preferring the "fun" classroom - take a look at the average spelling in comments on youtube and so many other blogs - then clearly such tests ought to be downgraded to exclude such obscurities and to only include words like those in the 20's and 30's tests. This would give the average genius - who is at the level of those earlier decades - a chance to win.

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  5. I didn't recognize any of this year's words, and I'll bet they aren't in my dictionary either. What is the point of such a contest?

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    Replies
    1. It's because the only way to be eliminated from a "bee" is to misspell a word, and these kids know all the simpler words, so if the contest were confined to those, it would go on indefinitely.

      I'm sure the local rounds (the earlier rounds), include more familiar words.

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