Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source - Merriam-Webster's Unabridged. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of words," Trinkle says. "Our raison d'etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist. The group includes five former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar. The positions are filled via word of mouth within the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. This year's meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. I was just told, 'You're the new Harvey.'" Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991. The current collaborative approach didn't take shape until the early '90s. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire's book "American Bee," creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, and then by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s. The panel's work has changed over the decades. "Nice word, but bye-bye," pronouncer Kevin Moch says.įor the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a word list that will challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors - and preferably produce a champion within the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night's finals. Shivashankar says the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the rest of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. The word gleyde (pronounced "glide"), which means a decrepit old horse and is only used in Britain, has a near-homonym - glyde - with a similar but not identical pronunciation and the same meaning. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection. That's what happened late in Sunday's meeting. Hearing the words aloud with the entire panel present - laptops open to Merriam-Webster's Unabridged dictionary - sometimes illuminates problems. 770-1,110 - those used in the semifinal rounds and beyond - with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room. They are given printouts including words Nos. The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention center outside Washington where the bee is staged every year. This year, Scripps - a Cincinnati-based media company - granted The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that The AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list. Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the appropriate round of the nearly century-old annual competition to identify the English language's best speller.įor decades, the word panel's work has been a closely guarded secret. No apologies for flubs.īy the time of this gathering, two days before the bee, the word list is all but complete. Late in the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues - so measured in their pacing and meticulous in their enunciation during the bee - rip through that chore as quickly as possible. As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee's word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.īefore panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they need to hear each word and its language of origin, part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud. Spelling bee pronouncer learned the meaning of K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E “I should be able to spell this, but here we are.”ġ997: Euonym “Now you’re making me feel dumb.”Ģ000: Demarche “I refuse to believe any of these are real words.OXON HILL, Md. They got better, the words got harder and now you need an encyclopedic knowledge of language to compete. TV coverage changed the bee and soon kids began to boot camp for competitions. For years the bee was pretty normal, featuring words most of us could at least attempt. The national spelling bee has been a part of this country’s DNA since 1925. Most adults could at least attempt these words, but we’re talking about kids aged 8 to 15. In 2015 you’d need to know “scherenschnitte,” a German word for scissor cuts in paper craft. In 1984 the winning word at the Scripps National Spelling Bee was “luge.” Luge, like the sport, four letters - no real tricks.
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