Listen to this episode and find out more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/wordsport.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, feed royal jelly to language larvae.
This is the last episode - for now - of our Word Play series about word games, and because why not have a nest of numbers, it is also the second of two episodes about the Scripps Spelling Bee, this time what goes into making word sports. Listen to the previous episode where people talked about why they care about the Bee and what participating in it did and does for them.
And! Members of the Allusioverse got Beecaps about each day I spent at the Bee, which was an extraordinary experience, so to read those, head over to theallusionist.org/donate. And in return for your donation, you also get to hang out in the Allusioverse Discord, you get behind the scenes info about the making of each episode, you get regular livestreams with relaxing readings from my ever-expanding collection of reference books, and you’re funding the making of this independent nugget of media.
You also get special stuff when I do live shows, and big news: I’ll be doing a bunch of live shows in the UK, and hopefully Ireland, in late August/early September! Go to theallusionist.org/events for tickets, more dates will be posted as soon as the tickets are on sale; got several cities to add to the bill. The new live show is called Souvenirs, and I think it’s the best live show I’ve concocted so far - previous ones that are on your podfeed include WPM and No Title, if you want an idea of how a live Allusionist is, because it’s not me sitting interviewing someone in front of an audience, no no it’s a show-show, with visuals and music and in this case a really funny, uplifting, cool story. So come! theallusionist.org/events. And if you happen to work at an arts or literature or fringe or comedy or audio festival somewhere and want some Allusionist on-stage delights, get in touch.
Also, this is the show’s 197th episode, so episode 200 looms: what do you think I should do for it?
OK, on with the Beelusionist.
HZ: Since the last episode, several people have asked me to explain why a spelling bee is called a bee. Before looking it up, the assumption I would have made is that it was something to do with how bees buzz, like the sound of a roomful of spellers spelling; or people gathered together like bees in a hive, being busy as they embarked on a communal task that sometimes had a competitive edge. There were quilting bees to complete a quilt, husking bees to denude corncobs, raising-bees to build barns and roofing bees to finish roofs, and, horrifically, there were also lynching bees or hanging bees in the late 19th and early 20th century USA.
This sense of ‘bee’ may have nothing to do with bees at all. The etymology is in the crowded category of “eh maybe? Can’t be sure.” It might derive from a term ‘been’, meaning receiving help from community, from a medieval English word ‘bene’ that meant a prayer or a summons, linked to the word ‘boon’. But, we can’t be sure about that origin either, so the Scripps Spelling Bee doesn’t need to scrap its cute bee logo and replace it with a graphic of helpful medieval people.
The term ‘spelling bee’ has been in use since the first half of the 19th century, which is also when spelling competitions were becoming very popular in the USA, although they were also known as ‘spellings’, ‘spelling matches’, ‘spelling-fights’ and ‘spelldowns’. Spelling bee, and all the other types of bee, got the term from ‘spinning-bee’, which is first found in print in 1769, because women in New England were gathering to spin for the purpose of producing American-made fabrics so they didn’t have to buy any from old England - spinning-bees were protests against British taxation and they were a form of boycott of British products.
And similarly, spelling-bees also were part of American nation-building. In the 1780s, Noah Webster began publishing spelling books, because he thought American children should learn from American-made books, not British ones, and he didn’t think that American English should be governed by British linguistic priorities. His spelling books were enormously popular, and sold so many millions of copies that they were ubiquitous for school-age American children. Students studied the spelling books and they learned the version of English honed by Noah Webster as American English, and they perfected it to compete in spelling bees and that’s a good way to establish a particular version of English as the correct and standard one.
Spelling bees became very widespread across 19th century USA at a local level, but the first national one was held by the National Education Association in Cleveland, Ohio in 1908. The contest was a little different to how it is now, being between teams from a handful of American cities. The Cleveland team won, and the overall winner was Marie Bolden, aged 13 or 14 at the time. Such was the racist outcry at a Black speller winning the tournament that later, Marie Bolden rarely mentioned her achievement, and her own family didn’t even know about it until after she died and they found a press clipping among her possessions.
The annual national spelling bee that is now known as the Scripps National Spelling Bee began in 1925, started by the Courier-Journal newspaper based in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1941, Scripps acquired the rights to the event, and still administers it today. But the Scripps Spelling Bee is more than the televised spelling tournament that takes place during the annual Bee Week. Here’s Corrie Loeffler, the executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: So, during Bee Week, there's a lot of figuring out what the week looks like, and working with our broadcast partners, and working behind the scenes on administering the competition, all the planning and all of that. But most of the year, we're actually working on what I think is the biggest impact of our mission, and that is working with about 25,000 schools that participate, creating the materials for them to have great Spelling Bee programs in their schools, and then working with about 200 regional partners who put on programs in their communities. So that takes a lot of coordination, communication, building all those materials, so we have people doing that - I've got a staff of twelve people that I work with to do all of that all year long. And then we get to the Bee Week part of it. We work pretty much full time on Bee Week for a couple months of the year, and the rest of it is how do we get those 200 and change kids here to DC through the entire program structure?
HZ: How do you keep a 99-year-old event fresh and kind of relevant to now, whilst also being true to its history?
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Well, I think the simplicity of the format and the fact that it - we added the vocabulary element to this about a decade ago, but, other than that, it's pretty much the same format that it's been for the last hundred years, right? And there's something so… relatable to it, like we all have to spell something every day, right? So you can easily play along. I think that that keeps it still engaging for people keeping it fresh.
I mean, for us, what we've learned, especially through the broadcast experience, because you see real data about what people enjoy and what people change the channel during and what they want to see as the competition. And so I feel like if we stay true to the core of what this is in what we put out to the world, that's what people are going to keep coming back for. So that's what we're trying to do. It's not really about keeping it fresh. It's about recognizing that what we have is gold for a reason.
HZ: I wanted to know more about the word part of this word sport. Because a lot of work goes into that part of the competition, the pronouncer doesn’t just give them a randomly selected word from the dictionary - I mean, who would randomly select words from the dictionary?
BEN ZIMMER: My name is Ben Zimmer. So for Scripps, I serve on the word panel, I oversee a great team that works on the vocabulary questions, and I'm also involved in sort of strategy as well, just in terms of making sure the word list is in shape for the competition.
JANE SOLOMON: I'm Jane Solomon. I'm on the word panel. I work on vocabulary questions.
BEN ZIMMER: In terms of the overall word list, both spelling and vocabulary, we're working on things well in advance, always thinking about what's going to come up for the next Bee and the Bee after that, thinking long term. So the way that the different stages of competition work for this national Bee: the preliminaries on the first day of competition for both spelling and vocabulary, there are actually lists of words that the kids can study.
HZ: There's the Words of the Champions list that contains 4,000 words selected from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.
BEN ZIMMER: Very large lists, but there are lists that they can find the words they're going to be asked about in the preliminary rounds. Once we get off-list, once we start into the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals for both spelling and vocabulary: these are not things that they had lists to consult for.
HZ: From the quarter-finals onwards, the contestants only know that the words will be sourced from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.
JANE SOLOMON: I'll also add that the first day is studied, and so the kids come prepared for that and on the second day you start to see words that the kids maybe did not study. So there's more questions about roots on the second day; there's more questions about these building blocks that they have studied. And it is harder as the competition goes on.
BEN ZIMMER: It's interesting for spelling, which is obviously the focus of their preparation. They may have all sorts of ways of studying to cover roots from different languages and what happens when a German word enters English and how does the spelling match with the pronunciation, and in all these different cases to try to cover all the things that they might possibly encounter in these later rounds, the really hard words.
So we come prepared with a very long list actually, and just select ranges from that list that's appropriate for each stage. And then the words that we don't use, we may hold onto those for the next year or the year after or the year after. But each year though, we're also developing new content as well. And so we're seeing what we have left over from previous competitions and then adding, adding new material, always being careful that we don't repeat things that were recently used in competition. So there are various words that are off limits to us because they have already come up either at the national or regional stage. And we don't want that because we want it to be, again, kind of a level playing field for all the kids to have words that they might not have already encountered in a recent competition, at least.
HZ: A word used in the competition will be benched for usually around three years before it can go back into the list of words that might be used in the Bee.
Although the core Bee format has always been children spelling aloud on stage, some other forms of the competition have changed a little. For example, for several years starting 2002, there was a written spelling test that narrowed down the field of contestants before the live rounds. And for a while, it included multiple choice vocabulary questions. But the Bee got rid of the written test a little while ago. Then in 2021, vocabulary rounds were added to the live competition, interspersed between spelling rounds.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: We change the format of the competition every year based on the number of kids and what we have to do during the week and all of that. We reevaluate what we need after Bee Week each year and come back to it. And really, before the vocabulary part of it, there were actually a lot of folks who would say, “What is the value of this? It's just rote memorization”, all this kind of, “We've got spell check now, what's the purpose of learning to spell?” And for us, for a long time, we have a new mission statement now, but for a long time, our mission statement was about, what is the purpose of learning to spell - improving spelling, increasing vocabulary skill, all of this. And we as a team were asking ourselves, what are we really doing to make sure that the vocabulary part of our mission statement is actually part of what we do?
BEN ZIMMER: For vocabulary, we're not necessarily giving them very hard words. We are trying to reward them for being well read, literate. And also to kind of reflect on how the work they're already doing into studying classical roots from Latin and Greek, for instance. Even if it's a word that seems unfamiliar, they're like, "Oh yeah, that's this root plus that root. I can infer the meaning based on, based on all of this work that I put into it." So we think of it as a kind of a reward for all of the work they're putting into it, and then also trying to get a sense that to really understand these words in context and their meaning also requires being well read.
When we get beyond that, and we're thinking about what counts as a fair word, a word that won't be seen as something that these kids couldn't possibly know. One thing we try to be sensitive about is what we think about as sort of cultural knowledge. These are kids generally fifth to eighth graders, who, again, are doing lots of intensive language study, but that doesn't mean that they're going to know certain kinds of cuisine, or other things - if they're not learning those words as spelling words, we shouldn't expect them to know about things that, for adults, we might be more familiar with, but at that age, they just might not have encountered things in their daily lives. So we try to stay away from that; that's one of the lessons that we've learned over the years about what feels fair, if things end up focusing more on those roots that they're already learning.
HZ: In the vocabulary rounds, the speller is given a word and a choice of three definitions, and they have to pick the right one. The fake definitions are written very cleverly, to be fun to hear but also having some linguistic logic to them. I particularly enjoyed the answer choices for ‘genome’.
CLIP from the 2024 Spelling Bee:
Pronouncer Jacques Bailly: “What is a genome? A. an imaginary being known for dwelling in caves; B. a rural police officer, especially in France; C. a set of chromosomes and the genes they contain?”
JANE SOLOMON: It's been a few years of figuring out what is a good wrong answer, because you don't want it to be too hard, and you don't want it to be too easy, to figure out what it is, and you want it to always feel fair. And so you have to do that across all the questions you write. In terms of how we pick distractor answers one of the things that we'll think about is what's a word that sounds like this word, and then write something that sounds like a definition based off of that other word.
BEN ZIMMER: But it's important that a word that is suggested by a wrong answer isn't too close to the right answer, because that would be unfair. If the words are distinct etymologically, and semantically they just happen to be similar, then we think that's fair game to be a distractor. So just as an example of words that sound alike but have no connection whatsoever are balalaika, balaclava and baklava. So if you're using one of those words and asking what it meant, you could use definitions for those other two as distractors because they’re different words.
That one might be even a little too tricky, but that's the type of thing that we're thinking about when we're coming up with wrong answers, is to think what sounds similar so that you could confuse it if you weren't quite sure what the word was, but not being so tricky that it feels like it's unfair.
At the same time, the fact that they have to be on top of all these vocabulary words means you can't just be like drilling on dictionary words 24/7: read something, read anything -
HZ: Have a conversation!
BEN ZIMMER: - have a conversation, yeah, just be aware of what's happening in the world by reading newspapers and magazines and so forth in addition to fiction. All of that I think helps in terms of the kids who do the best with the vocabulary words. And so kids who are reading a lot will naturally do better with that.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: And it is really interesting to see the types of words that were missed, words that you and I would probably think were not challenging: words like ‘tandem’ and ‘holistic’ and ‘swanky’, things we wouldn’t think twice about.
HZ: We're adults. We've had more time to learn and use words.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Yeah. I don't think ‘swanky’ is quite Gen Alpha slang at this point.
HZ: Maybe they'll bring it back. Someone on TikTok will get hold of it and they'll be all over the place and then we'll be irritated by it and we'll stop using it forever.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Right? But it shows this new challenge for the kids, because those aren't necessarily hard words to spell, so they wouldn't be studying them for the spelling portion of the competition. We're saying this is about language as a whole and how you use it. And we think it's pretty core to our mission to keep doing that.
BEN ZIMMER: This isn't just a competition about memorizing a bunch of words in a dictionary, but sort of like really appreciating, in this more holistic way, the way words work in the language.
HZ: But there are always some Bee viewers who are pissy about the vocabulary round. "I came for orthography, not semantics!"
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Honestly, I think the biggest aversion to it is the change from the tradition. I don't think anybody's like, “No, these kids shouldn't know what these words mean, this is a spelling bee,” right? I think it really is semantics. Like, “You're saying it's a spelling bee and now it's a spelling bee with vocabulary? What are you going to make them do next, tap dance?” Like, that kind of thing.
HZ: Are they expecting literal bees?
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Right? That's my new comeback. I'm stealing that from you. I'm stealing that and I'm stealing ‘beeple’.
HZ: Okay - unleash the bees! That will teach them to complain.
BEN ZIMMER: To introduce a new component is always going to feel odd and take some period of adjustment, I think. It has been a few years now, I think people have gotten used to it; we don't hear as many people sort of raising that objection.
HZ: I personally liked the vocabulary rounds. During the spelling rounds, there were very few of the words I could define, let alone spell. But I could actually play along with the vocabulary round, which was fun. And a higher proportion of contestants got through the vocabulary rounds than the spelling rounds. Those spelling rounds are HARD. They have to be.
BEN ZIMMER: We prepare a big list that is far more than we'll ever need in competition; we have to be able to adjust to figuring out which words in the words that we've prepared for competition will be appropriate at each stage, just how difficult words need to be in order for us to get from this initial group - and this year it's 245, down to a group of finalists on the final night. There's a matter of pacing and fitting our time constraints. And so there's all kinds of calculations that have to go into thinking what is appropriate at each level.
HZ: This year, 148 spellers were still in the competition at the beginning of the day of the quarter-finals and semi-finals; by the end of that day, only eight spellers remained to go through to the final. The press reported the day's proceedings as a "bloodbath", "Spelling's saddest day" - but it's an essential characteristic of any tournament, isn’t it, that most competitors will be eliminated.
BEN ZIMMER: There are only so many ways that you can winnow down such a large group to a smaller one. And over the course of that day, quarter-finals and semi-finals, it really does require a lot of winnowing, and so cranking up the difficulty level is just it's a necessity. I mean, how else are you going to get to a smaller group? Unless we, for instance, reintroduced the written tests, which was another method of doing that.
HZ: I thought you were going to say gladiatorial lion battles.
BEN ZIMMER: Or that, sure, yeah. But the written test was a way to try to get at that as a way to help get the group down. But if you do that, then some kids might get eliminated without having actually heard the bell on stage, just based on their score on a test. So that might not feel completely satisfying either. So it's a balancing act.
It's also based on how many kids are able to come each year, and that varies from year to year in terms of the numbers. So, yeah, in terms of figuring out how to get from a very large number to a small one, sometimes that does require rounds that are super difficult.
But the thinking is, though, that, again, in the interest of fairness, making sure you have a kind of a consistent leveling as we call it, so the kids don't feel like, “I just got this ridiculously hard word and that kid got an easy one, what's up with that?” We never want to make anyone feel like we've made it unfair for them. And so the rationale for a decision to eliminate a speller is always sort of like spelled out exactly why this was the case, and we're eliminating as much sort of grey area as we possibly can. That's why we spend months working on these lists and exactly what the wording of the vocabulary questions are going to be, exactly how the information is presented for the spelling questions too, when they're being when they're up there for a spelling question, they again may be asking about etymology. There are very specific rules about the kind of information that can be asked about.
HZ: In the spelling rounds, the spellers have to spell the word before 90 seconds is up, and during the first 75 seconds they can ask questions of the pronouncer and associate pronouncer: they can ask them to repeat the word’s pronunciation, alternate pronunciations if any exist, they can ask for a definition, its use in a sentence, which part of speech it is, what are the word's languages of origin. They can't directly ask what the etymology is, but they can ask if it has a specific origin.
BEN ZIMMER: They can ask, “Is this the” - for instance - “Greek word for water?” They have to be that specific in order to get a yes or no from the assistant pronouncer, who has all this information in front of them. They have to be that specific and it has to be about a recognized root that's in the etymology in that entry of the [Merriam-Webster] Unabridged or else they can't answer it. And so that's why you often hear them say, "I don't see that here."
HZ: “I don’t see that here” doesn't always mean the contestant was incorrect, but may indicate that the phrasing of their question could not be met with an answer within the boundaries of the rules.
BEN ZIMMER: Even still, the kids will sometimes still be trying to fish a little bit by saying, “Does this come from X meaning Y?” You can tell it's often because they've been coached to do that. Like if there's any little bit of information that you may be able to glean that will help you figure out, “is this schwa an A or an E or an I or an O” - that schwa sound can be so many different letters, and often that's just figuring out how these roots come together. It can be sort of a joining sound between two roots coming from Latin and Greek typically.
JANE SOLOMON: There was kid last night who was like, "Does this have anything to do with penguins?" And then everyone laughed because that was obviously not a question they could answer.
BEN ZIMMER: Right. But then you get the kids who are so well prepared, they say, what was it? The Greek root for hemlock?
HZ: I was very impressed by that.
CLIP: In round 6 of the 2024 Spelling Bee, Jacques Bailly gives the pronunciations of conyrine: [CON-er-een] or [CON-er-ən].
HZ: The speller was Ananya, who appeared in the previous episode.
Ananya: Conyrine - does this come from the Latin ‘conium’ meaning hemlock?
Jacques Bailly: Yes!
BEN ZIMMER: As the Bee has evolved, as the kids just get better and better, the words do have to get more and more difficult: that's the only way that we can actually pick a winner, by making it this hard, and also sometimes expanding the net of available words from the dictionary. And so that now, for instance, there are geographical names that are listed in the online unabridged dictionary from Merriam-Webster, which might have been off limits before, but now the kids need to know that as well. And again, it's really just an effort, I think, of Scripps to keep up with how good the kids are getting year after year and innovating or coming up with new approaches in order to meet that challenge.
HZ: Even though the Bee has to try to stay ahead of how good the spellers are, and how the training techniques keep getting more advanced, in 2019, in the battle of spellers versus dictionary, there was an extraordinary victory.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: Oh, 2019 was our OctoChamps year.
HZ: OctoChamps, noun, ‘octo’ as in eight, ‘champs’ as in champs: yes, the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee had eight co-champions.
BEN ZIMMER: Having an eight-way tie for first place kind of indicates the kind of training and preparation that these kids are doing is at such a high level. And they have access to the same kinds of resources these days. There's software and all sorts of ways to sort of train, that they seemed to all be able to excel at the very top.
HZ: All eight spellers just kept spelling the words correctly. The final had gone for twenty rounds, it was after midnight, and nobody had spelled a word wrong for more than an hour.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: So there was a lot of behind the scenes, “Wow, these kids are not missing in the finals.” We were getting to a point where we had plenty of words still left in the list. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, they ran out of words” - we did not run out of words, but we did get to a point where we knew the words that we had in our competition list, which is prepared over an 18-month period, we don't pick things on the fly, that's all part of the integrity of the competition.
We knew that we were not going to be able to get to one champion. So there's like all this stuff happening backstage while the competition is continuing live on television and then we made an announcement that this is how much time we have left in the competition and whoever's still there at the end is going to be a champion.
And in that championship round, as each kid continued to get their word right, it was the most electric championship moment - eight championship moments - that I've ever seen. Like, being in that room felt like being nowhere else in the world.
HZ: All eight were declared co-champions.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: The kids celebrating for each other with each other - people asked a lot, “Wouldn't you rather have the championship to yourself?” And they were all like, "No!" Like it was emphatic, none of them were feeling like they were cheated of their spotlight.
BEN ZIMMER: This is not this sort of like cutthroat competition where like, “I'm out to get you” or whatever - you rarely see that kind of vibe at all.
CORRIE LOEFFLER: That is a year that's always going to stand out, I think, both for the panic and then the absolute elation. It was a huge story. Of course, there was some like, "Oh, is the Spelling Bee broken?" But clearly it's not. We're still - we're good. But it was, I mean, honestly, one of the most exciting things that I've ever seen, once we figured out what to do about it.
BEN ZIMMER: At the time it was fun, but it was sort of clear that you couldn't keep having eight-way ties for first place. It was fun for that one year, at least. So I think since then, there have been various efforts to try to differentiate the top competitors a bit more, and we've had various innovations like the spell-off, which you could see as a reaction to that as well.
HZ: The spell-off has only happened twice so far, in 2022 and this year, 2024. The rules currently state that a spell-off will be declared if there is not yet a winner by the one hour 55-minute mark of the broadcast final.
BEN ZIMMER: The remaining spellers have 90 seconds to spell a list of words as quickly as they can. There's a special buzzer that they press in order to advance to the next word. There's all sorts of technology that goes into it.
HZ: Each finalist is faced with the same word list. They compete one at a time, so if a speller hasn’t had their turn yet, they are sequestered with headphones so they can't hear the words. This year two finalists competed in the spell-off, and the first speller Bruhat Soma became champion after spelling 29 words correctly in 90 seconds. It was mesmerising to witness!
CLIP: In the spell-off in the 2024 final, Bruhat Soma spells several words very very quickly.
HZ: What do you enjoy most about this job?
JANE SOLOMON: Well, writing the questions is really fun; you get to think about words and what they mean. And you're also thinking about what will be a word that is interesting or delightful or useful for the kids competing in this to know. So that, that's a very fun part of it - but also coming to the Bee and seeing how the focus is so much on friendship and, so much on just learning these skills that will be with you for your whole life, because spelling has taken on a very different role in society since the Bee was introduced 99 years ago. Machines can do spelling for you, there's spellcheck. So it has become more of an esoteric skill, which is not a negative thing. I'm all for esoteric skills. I think they're really important.
But there's a lot of other reasons and applications of the studying and the discipline and the friendly competition, the showing grace when you don't spell your word right: these are all really applicable life skills. I guess the question was, what do I like best about it? These are things that I have reflected upon since starting working with the Bee and seeing it firsthand, because I would never have been able to compete as a child. I am a terrible speller, but I see how much it means to people who are here and it's really touching.
BEN ZIMMER: It's a delight to work with with everyone. I look forward to when we have our meetings or when Bee Week happens, because I just really enjoy being around these people, people who care about this whole thing, care about language, care about words, my kind of people. I love that there's this whole kind of institution that supports the love of language and the love of words; and then seeing that reflected in the kids themselves and seeing how, how they appreciate language makes me appreciate it even more.
Again, it's not about rote memorization, it's about like, where is it coming from? How does the spelling actually reflect the entire history of the word as it has moved through different languages on its way to English? That is itself a kind of a narrative that they have to piece together in order to understand why we have, this spelling that seems sometimes irrational, sometimes just lacking any kind of sense.
HZ: Sigh... Tell me about it.
BEN ZIMMER: But there are always historical reasons for how spelling in English has become that way.
HZ: Yep. Not always good reasons, but there are reasons.
BEN ZIMMER: And so the fact that they're all kind of unpacking this for all the words that they're learning, but then they sort of take all of this with them as they go through life - growing up in a way that you appreciate the language and where words come from and what that means in terms of all the different cultures that have come into contact with each other over the year that cause a word to travel from one language to another and change along the way. And I love seeing them engage with that on a level that goes far beyond memorization. There's pleasure in learning about even the most obscure things, and why not just celebrate that?
HZ: You heard from, in order of appearance, Corrie Loeffler, Ben Zimmer and Jane Solomon. Corrie is the executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. As well as his work for the Bee, Ben is a linguist and language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and Jane Solomon is a former lexicographer and current type designer with Lettermatic. And you can find out all the spelling bee’s rules and this year’s words and contestants and officials at spellingbee.com.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
univocal, adjective, philosophy and linguistics: having only one possible meaning; unambiguous.
Try using ‘univocal’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of PaleBirdMusic.com.
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