National Spelling Bee Exclusive Secrets: Picking the Words to Identify a Champion

OXON Hill, Maryland –

As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee word selection panel enters its seventh hour, the utterers don’t seem to care.

Before panelists can discuss the words chosen for the bee, they must hear each word and its source language, part of speech, definition, and example sentence read aloud. At the end of the meeting, the main announcer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues, so measured in their rhythm and meticulous in their pronunciation during the contest, perform this task as quickly as possible. No breaks. No apologies for the glitches.

At the time of this meeting, two days before the bee, the word list is almost complete. Each word has been vetted by the panel and placed in the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the best speller in the English language.

For decades, word panel work has been a closely guarded secret. Earlier this year, Scripps, a Cincinnati-based media company, gave The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-meeting, with the stipulation that AP would not release words unless they were delisted.

THEY ARE HARD WITH WORDS

The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room inside the convention center outside Washington, where the bee performs every year. They are given printouts that include the words Nos. 770-1,110, those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond, with instructions that those sheets of paper are not to leave the room.

Hearing the words out loud with the entire panel present (laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary) sometimes illuminates issues. That was what happened at the end of the meeting on Sunday. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, OB/GYN and recent panel member, chimed in with an objection.

The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), meaning a decrepit old horse and used only in Britain, has a close namesake, glyde, with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning. Shivashankar says that the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to add gleyde entirely. It will not be used.

“Good word, but goodbye,” says pronouncer Kevin Moch.

For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a year-long process to put together a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle and elementary school age competitors, and preferably produce a champion within the broadcast window of two hours to the end of Thursday night.

Panel work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book “American Bee,” the creation of the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, director of editorial promotions at Scripps Howard, and later by Harvey Elentuck, a then-student. from MIT who approached Wagner. about helping with the list in the mid-1970s.

The panel was created in 1985. The current collaborative approach did not take shape until the early 1990s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.

“Harvey…made the whole list,” says Bailly. “I never met him. They just told me, ‘You’re the new Harvey.'”

IT’S NOT JUST CHOOSING WORDS

This year’s gathering includes five full-time bee staff members and 16 contract panelists. Positions are filled by word of mouth within the spelling community or panelist recommendations. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce most of his presentations by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’être was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, got in more contact with each other, and studied the same lists, it became harder to sustain a bee with those same kinds of words,” says Trinkle.

Now, most of the time it goes directly to the source: Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s easier than it used to be.

“The dictionary is on the computer and it’s very easy to look up in all sorts of ways, which spellers know about too. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can, which is sometimes the right thing to do.” that I do,” says Trinkle. “The best words happen to you as you scroll through the dictionary.”

Not everyone on the panel sends words. Some work to ensure that definitions, parts of speech, and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at appropriate moments in the competition; others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions. Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given tasks throughout the year to find a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.

Mishra draws his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates towards “the harder end of the spectrum.”

“They’re fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I were good at spelling I’d be intimidated by that word,” says Mishra, 28, who just finished his MBA at Harvard. “I’m not afraid of running out of (words), and I feel good about it.”

HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED

The panel meets several times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and eliminate problems. The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many of which cater to the offspring of highly educated first-generation Indian immigrants, a group that has arrived to dominate the competition.

In 2019, a confluence of factors, including a wild card program that allowed several spellers from competitive regions to make it to nationals, produced an unusually wide spelling field. Scripps had to use the toughest words on his list to select a dozen finalists. The bee ended in a draw at eight and there was no shortage of criticism.

Scripps, however, did not fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. He drew younger panelists more in tune with the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to identify a single champion. The wild card show was removed, and Scripps added on-stage vocabulary questions and a lightning tiebreaker.

The panel also started extracting words avoided in the past. Place names, trademarks, words with no source language—as long as a word isn’t archaic or outdated, it’s fair game.

“They started to understand that they have to dig deeper into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. “Last year, we started to see things like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

THERE IS A METICULOUSNESS IN EVERYTHING

Panel members insist they care little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and private trainers. But those coaches and businessmen spend a lot of time thinking about the words Scripps is likely to use, often with quite a bit of success.

Dasari says there are approximately 100,000 words in the dictionary that are appropriate for spelling bees. He promises that 99% of the words on Scripps’ list are included in the SpellPundit materials. Anyone who learns all those words is almost guaranteed to win, Dasari says, but no one has shown that he can do it.

“I just don’t know when someone will be able to completely master the entire dictionary,” says Dasari.

Since the bee resumed after its cancellation due to the 2020 pandemic, the panel has been heavily scrutinized for vocabulary questions, which have added a whimsical element, weeding out some of the most talented spellers, even if they don’t spell wrong one word Last year’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly kicked out for a vocabulary word, “swarm,” only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer could be construed as correct.

“That gave us an idea of ​​how very, very careful we have to be in terms of crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and top contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds.

Zimmer is also sensitive to criticism that some vocabulary questions test spellers’ cultural sophistication rather than their command of language roots and patterns. This year’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that will guide gifted spellers to the answers, she says.

There will always be complaints about the word list, but making the competition as fair as possible is the main goal of the panel. Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs: no question is too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle says, pointing to a word that has a homonym with a similar definition.

Scripps editorial director Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to remove that word entirely.”

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