The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Word games

What a time for the audio to go out: one of the most intense competitions in the English language is going on right now on ESPN, the final round of the 76th annual National Spelling Bee, but ESPN has gone silent. Fortunately I was able to catch the morning round, with sound, to discover how far the sport of competitive spelling has come since I gave it up 40 years ago. Today's spellers have not only style, but play-by-play and color commentary by former competitive spellers. Some of them spell so fast the judges must listen to an audio replay to determine if the contestant got it right, while others pause dramatically after each letter. All of them use what strategy they can during play, asking for definitions, word origins, or for the word in the context of a sentence, pronouncing the word over and over before risking everything by spelling it out. Spelling may never draw the kind of crowd or excitement that more physical sports attract, but at least it now has a major motion picture: Spellbound, a documentary about the National Spelling Bee, just opened in theaters.

They say you never forget the word you missed, and I do remember the one that ultimately tripped me (ebullition -- the act/process/state of boiling or bubbling up; sudden and violent outburst/display) as well as the one that knocked me out of competition for a few rounds: you know that 60s band fronted by John Fogerty, best known for its hit "Rolling on the River"? Nobody had heard of Credence (or was it Creedence?) Clearwater Revival back then, nor did anybody encounter the word "credence/creedence" except in spelling competitions. A Google search on "Creedence Clearwater Revival" turns up 58,800 results, while a search for "Credence Clearwater Revival" returns only 6,140. I'm not sure which way I spelled the word in competition, but my choice was ruled wrong by the judges and I was eliminated. As I sat there in the audience watching the rest of the competition, however, I had no idea that my mother had left the auditorium and gone to find a dictionary. The dictionary considered both versions of "credence/creedence" correct, though one (I forget which) was preferred, and when Mom pointed that out to the judges, I was reinstated, which was advantageous to me because I got the word "advantageous" right, thus moving on to the next round.

If you'd like to get into competitive spelling yourself, you should start young, as no one over the age of 16 may compete in the National Bee. One of today's finalists is a third-grader, while the others are 8th-graders. You'll have to memorize a lot of words, but to make things easier, you can ignore the following winning words from spelling bees past, since they probably won't be used again anytime soon:

gladiolus
abrogate
luxuriance
albumen
asceticism
fracas
foulard
knack
torsion
deteriorating
intelligible
interning
promiscuous
sanitarium
canonical
therapy
initials
sacrilegious
semaphore
chlorophyll
psychiatry
dulcimer
meticulosity
insouciant
vignette
soubrette
transept
crustaceology
condominium
schappe
syllepsis
catamaran
eudaemonic
smaragdine
esquamulose
equipage
sycophant
eczema
ratoon
chihuahua
abalone
interlocutory
croissant
shalloon
macerate
vouchsafe
hydrophyte
incisor
narcolepsy
cambist
deification
maculature
elucubrate
sarcophagus
psoriasis
Purim
luge
milieu
odontalgia
staphylococci
elegiacal
spoliator
fibranne
antipyretic
lyceum
kamikaze
antediluvian
xanthosis
vivisepulture
euonym
chiaroscurist
logorrhea
demarche
succedaneum
prospicience

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @2:49 PM

29.5.03