OXON HILL, Md. — As the ultimate pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers not appear to care.
Before panelists can debate the words picked for the bee, they should hear each word and its language of origin, a part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence read aloud.
Late within the meeting, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues — so measured of their pacing and meticulous of their enunciation in the course of the bee — rip through that chore as quickly as possible.
No pauses. No apologies for flubs.
By the point of this gathering, two days before the bee, the glossary is all but complete. Each word has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the suitable round of the nearly century-old annual competition to discover the English language’s best speller.
For a long time, the word panel’s work has been a closely guarded secret. This 12 months, 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 wouldn’t reveal words unless they were cut from the list.
THEY’RE TOUGH ON WORDS
The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked contained in the convention center outside Washington where the bee is staged every 12 months. They’re given printouts including the words Nos. 770 to 1,110 — those utilized in the semifinal rounds and beyond — with instructions that those sheets of paper cannot leave the room.
Hearing the words aloud with your entire panel present — laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary — sometimes illuminates problems. That’s what happened late in Sunday’s meeting. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a recent addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.
The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which suggests a decrepit old horse and is just utilized in Britain, has a near-homonym — glyde — with an identical but not equivalent pronunciation and the identical meaning. Shivashankar says the variant spelling makes the word too confusing, and the remainder of the panel quickly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It won’t be used.
“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch says.
For the panelists, the meeting is the culmination of a yearlong process to assemble a glossary that may challenge but not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged competitors — and preferably produce a champion throughout the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.
The panel’s work has modified over the a long time.
From 1961 to 1984, in response 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, after which by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list within the mid-Nineteen Seventies.
The panel was created in 1985. The present collaborative approach didn’t take shape until the early ’90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.
“Harvey … made the entire list,” Bailly says. “I never met him. I used to be just told, ‘You’re the brand new Harvey.’”
IT’S NOT JUST PICKING WORDS
This 12 months’s meeting includes five full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists.
The positions are filled via word of mouth throughout the spelling community or recommendations from panelists. 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 provide nearly all of her submissions by reading periodicals like The Latest Yorker or The Economist.
“Our raison d’etre was to show spellers a wealthy vocabulary that they may use of their day by day lives. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more involved with one another and were studying off the identical lists, it became harder to carry a bee with those self same kinds of words,” Trinkle says.
Now, most of the time she goes on to the source — Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged.
That’s easier than it was once.
“The dictionary is on the pc and is very searchable in all types of how — which the spellers know as well. In the event that they want to seek out all of the words that entered the language within the 1650s, they will try this, which is usually what I do,” Trinkle says. “The perfect words type of occur to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”
Not everyone on the panel submits words.
Some work to make sure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of comparable difficulty are asked at the fitting times within the competition; others deal with crafting the bee’s latest multiple-choice vocabulary questions.
Those that submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments all year long to give you a certain number at a certain level of difficulty.
Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he began when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum.”
“They’re fun and difficult for me they usually make me smile, and I do know if I used to be a speller I can be intimidated by that word,” says the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his MBA at Harvard. “I haven’t any fear about running out (of words), and I be ok with that.”
HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED
The panel meets a couple of times a 12 months, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems.
The method appeared to go easily through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants — a gaggle that has come to dominate the competition.
In 2019, a confluence of things — amongst them, a wild-card program that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to achieve nationals — produced an unusually deep field of spellers. Scripps had to make use of the hardest words on its list simply to cull to a dozen finalists.
The bee resulted in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics.
Scripps, nevertheless, didn’t fundamentally change the best way the word panel operates.
It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. And it made format changes designed to discover a sole champion. The wild-card program was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.
The panel also began pulling words avoided up to now. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: So long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.
“They’ve began to grasp they must push further into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder together with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and hosts a well-liked online bee. “Last 12 months, we began seeing stuff like tribal names which are a number of the hardest words within the dictionary.”
THERE’S A METICULOUSNESS TO IT ALL
Members of the panel insist they worry little about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and personal coaches. But those coaches and entrepreneurs spend quite a lot of time desirous about the words Scripps is prone to use — often quite successfully.
Dasari says there are roughly 100,000 words within the dictionary which are appropriate for spelling bees. He pledges that 99% of the words on Scripps’ list are included in SpellPundit’s materials.
Anyone who learns all those words is all but guaranteed to win, Dasari says — but nobody has shown they will do it.
“I just don’t know when anybody would give you the chance to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari says.
Because the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinized largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious element, knocking out a number of the most gifted spellers even in the event that they don’t misspell a word.
Last 12 months’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary word, “pullulation” — only to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her answer might be construed as correct.
“That gave us a way of how very, very careful we have to be by way of crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of words for the vocabulary rounds.
Zimmer can also be sensitive to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication fairly than their mastery of roots and language patterns.
This 12 months’s vocabulary questions contain more clues that may guide gifted spellers to the answers, he says.
There’ll all the time be complaints in regards to the glossary, but making the competition as fair as possible is the panel’s chief goal.
Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs — absolute confidence is simply too insignificant.
“This is de facto problematic,” Trinkle says, declaring a word that has a homonym with an identical definition.
Scripps editorial manager Maggie Lorenz agrees: “We’re going to bump that word entirely.”
Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012.