Exclusive secrets and techniques of the National Spelling Bee: Picking the phrases to determine a champion

OXON HILL, Md. — As the ultimate pre-competition assembly of the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s phrase choice panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers not appear to care.

Before panelists can debate the phrases picked for the bee, they should hear every phrase and its language of origin, a part of speech, definition and exemplary sentence learn aloud. Late within the assembly, lead pronouncer Jacques Bailly and his colleagues — so measured of their pacing and meticulous of their enunciation throughout the bee — rip by that chore as rapidly as doable. No pauses. No apologies for flubs.

By the time of this gathering, two days earlier than the bee, the thesaurus is all however full. Each phrase has been vetted by the panel and slotted into the suitable spherical of the almost century-old annual competitors to determine the English language’s greatest speller.

For many years, the phrase panel’s work has been a intently guarded secret. This yr, Scripps — a Cincinnati-based media firm — granted The Associated Press unique entry to the panelists and their pre-bee assembly, with the stipulation that The AP wouldn’t reveal phrases except they have been reduce from the record.

They’re robust on phrases

The 21 panelists sit round a makeshift, rectangular convention desk in a windowless room tucked contained in the conference middle outdoors Washington the place the bee is staged yearly. They are given printouts together with phrases Nos. 770-1,110 — these used within the semifinal rounds and past — with directions that these sheets of paper can’t depart the room.

PHOTOS: Exclusive secrets and techniques of the National Spelling Bee: Picking the phrases to determine a champion

Hearing the phrases aloud with your entire panel current — laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary — generally illuminates issues. That’s what occurred late in Sunday’s assembly. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion, an obstetrician/gynecologist and a latest addition to the panel, chimed in with an objection.

The phrase gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which suggests a decrepit previous horse and is simply utilized in Britain, has a near-homonym — glyde — with an identical however not equivalent pronunciation and a unique which means. Shivashankar says the near-homonym makes the phrase too complicated, and the remainder of the panel rapidly agrees to spike gleyde altogether. It received’t be used.

“Nice word, but bye-bye,” pronouncer Kevin Moch says.

For the panelists, the assembly is the fruits of a yearlong course of to assemble a thesaurus that may problem however not embarrass the 230 middle- and elementary-school-aged opponents — and ideally produce a champion throughout the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday evening’s finals.

The panel’s work has modified over the many years. From 1961 to 1984, in response to James Maguire’s e-book “American Bee,” creating the record was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, after which by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT scholar who approached Wagner about serving to with the record within the mid-Nineteen Seventies.

The panel was created in 1985. The present collaborative strategy didn’t take form till the early ‘90s. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.

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

It’s not simply choosing phrases

This yr’s assembly consists of 5 full-time bee staffers and 16 contract panelists. The positions are stuffed through phrase of mouth throughout the spelling neighborhood or suggestions from panelists. The group consists of 5 former champions: Barrie Trinkle (1973), Bailly, George Thampy (2000), Sameer Mishra (2008) and Shivashankar.

Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to supply the vast majority of her submissions by studying periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist.

“Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. 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.

Now, most of the time she goes on to the supply — Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. That’s simpler than it was.

“The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways — which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle says. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.”

Not everybody on the panel submits phrases. Some work to make sure that the definitions, components of speech and different accompanying info are appropriate; others are tasked with making certain that phrases of comparable issue are requested on the proper instances within the competitors; others deal with crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions. Those who submit phrases, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments all year long to provide you with a sure quantity at a sure degree of issue.

Mishra pulls his submissions from his personal record, which he began when he was a 13-year-old speller. He gravitates towards “the harder end of the spectrum.”

“They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word,” says the 28-year-old Mishra, who simply completed his MBA at Harvard. “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.”

How the bee has developed

The panel meets just a few instances a yr, usually nearly, to go over phrases, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out issues. The course of appeared to go easily by the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of extremely educated, first-generation Indian immigrants — a gaggle that has come to dominate the competitors.

In 2019, a confluence of things — amongst them, a wild-card program that allowed a number of spellers from aggressive areas to achieve nationals — produced an unusually deep area of spellers. Scripps had to make use of the hardest phrases on its record simply to cull to a dozen finalists. The bee resulted in an eight-way tie, and there was no scarcity of critics.

Scripps, nonetheless, didn’t essentially change the best way the phrase panel operates. It introduced in youthful panelists extra attuned to the methods modern spellers research and put together. And it made format adjustments designed to determine a sole champion. The wild-card program was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker.

The panel additionally started pulling phrases prevented prior to now. Place names, logos, phrases with no language of origin: As lengthy as a phrase isn’t archaic or out of date, it’s truthful sport.

“They’ve started to understand they have to 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 research guides and hosts a well-liked on-line bee. “Last year, we started seeing stuff like tribal names that are some of the hardest words in the dictionary.”

There’s a meticulousness to all of it

Members of the panel insist they fear little about different bees or the proliferation of research supplies and personal coaches. But these coaches and entrepreneurs spend quite a lot of time fascinated by the phrases Scripps is probably going to make use of — usually fairly efficiently.

Dasari says there are roughly 100,000 phrases within the dictionary which can be acceptable for spelling bees. He pledges that 99% of the phrases on Scripps’ record are included in SpellPundit’s supplies. Anyone who learns all these phrases is all however assured to win, Dasari says — however nobody has proven they’ll do it.

“I just don’t know when anybody would be able to completely master the unabridged dictionary,” Dasari says.

Since the bee resumed after its 2020 pandemic cancellation, the panel has been scrutinized largely for the vocabulary questions, which have added a capricious aspect, knocking out among the most gifted spellers even when they don’t misspell a phrase. Last yr’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly ousted on a vocabulary phrase, “pullulation” – solely to be reinstated minutes later after arguing that her reply may very well be construed as appropriate.

“That gave us a sense of how very, very careful we need to be in terms of crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a chief contributor of phrases for the vocabulary rounds.

Zimmer can also be delicate to the criticism that some vocabulary questions are evaluating the spellers’ cultural sophistication reasonably than their mastery of roots and language patterns. This yr’s vocabulary questions comprise extra clues that may information gifted spellers to the solutions, he says.

There will at all times be complaints in regards to the thesaurus, however making the competitors as truthful as doable is the panel’s chief objective. Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, ambiguities about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs – no query is simply too insignificant.

“This is really problematic,” Trinkle says, mentioning a phrase that has a homonym with an identical definition.

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

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