7 Quintessential National-Spelling-Bee-Winning Words
Since 1925 American grade-school students (and a few from outside the U.S.) have participated in a national spelling bee held annually in Washington, D.C. Students proceed through a series of rounds by spelling words correctly, and the winner of the bee is the contestant who pulls off one final word after all other spellers have been eliminated. Here are a few of the words that have resulted in victory. (For the complete list of winning words and a brief history of the contest, see the article National Spelling Bee.)
knack
(1928): âan ability, talent, or special skill needed to do somethingâ
To todayâs spelling-bee contestants, the words that dominated the early years of the National Spelling Bee must seem ridiculously easy. Indeed, all it took for Betty Robinson to win the bee in 1928 was a knack for spelling knack. Louis Edward Sissman, the top speller of 1946, later achieved modest fame as a poet, but his linguistic prowess was hardly demonstrated by his winning word: initials. As the national bee grew in popularity, the competition became tougher and the words more challenging. But even as recently as 1984, the short (though admittedly not everyday) word luge won the bee for Daniel Greenblatt.
esquamulose
(1962): ânot squamuloseâ
The tendency for winning words to be the sort of rarely encountered terms that even educated adults find difficult to spell emerged around the middle of the 20th century. In 1962 the bee came down to Nettie Crawford and Michael Day, who, according to the Associated Pressâs account, âengaged in more than an hour of head-and-head wrestling with words that grew stranger by the round.â The contest was declared a draw when neither could correctly spell esquamuloseâwhich is nonetheless considered the yearâs âwinning word.â (Esquamulose is the opposite of squamulose, which means âbeing or having a thallus made up of small leafy lobes.â Of course.) Similarly tricky words that spelling champs have managed to get right include staphylococci (1987), succedaneum (2001), and autochthonous (2004).
eczema
(1936, 1965): âan acute or chronic noncontagious inflammatory condition of the skin that is characterized by redness, itching, and oozing vesicular lesions which become scaly, crusted, or lichenified and that is often associated with exposure to chemical or other irritantsâ
Words used in the medical profession are notorious for stumping spellers, so itâs no surprise that they appear frequently in the list of winning words. In fact, eczema maintains the distinction of being the only word to have resulted in victory on two separate occasions: in 1936 for Jean Trowbridge and in 1965 for Michael Kerpan, Jr. Among the other medical terms on the list are, oddly, two other skin ailmentsâ psoriasis (1982) and xanthosis (1995)âas well as odontalgia (1986), which most people know better as toothache.
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Chihuahua
(1967): âany of a breed of very small, short- or long-haired dogs typically weighing between two and six pounds and having a round head with short, slightly pointed muzzle and large, erect earsâ
Contrary to what some may believe, capitalized words are not prohibited from the National Spelling Bee. These days, all entries in Websterâs Third New International Dictionary are fair game, including words derived from proper names. As it happens, a handful of words that the dictionary capitalizes have brought glory to those who spelled them correctly. Following Chihuahua (a dog named for a Mexican state) winning words have included Purim (1983), Ursprache (2006), and Laodicean (2009). Fortunately for contestantsâwho have enough else to remember!âthey are not required to indicate a wordâs capitalization during their turn at the microphone.
vivisepulture
(1996): âthe act or practice of burying aliveâ
One reason many people tune into the televised final rounds of the National Spelling Bee is to learn new and unusual words. Of the many uncommon words featured in the bee, some of the most fascinating are the ones that prompt the exclamation, âI didnât know there was a word for that!â For example, when a Christian church is shaped like a cross, the part that represents the shorter of the two cross-forming lines is called the transept (1954). And thereâs no need to resort to the hyphenated compound âwavy-hairedâ when cymotrichous (2011) can be used in its place. One of the best examples from the list of winning words is vivisepulture, a term thatâs certainly far less familiar than the morbid concept it describes.
shalloon
(1971): âa lightweight twilled fabric of wool or worsted used chiefly for linings of coats and uniformsâ
Of course, one need not understand the meaning of a word to appreciate it. Some words are simply pleasing to the ear or fun to pronounce, regardless of their semantic content. One example of such a word may be euphonious, which actually means âpleasing to the ear.â (It also makes frequent appearances in spelling bees.) And while aesthetic judgments are inevitably subjective, I bet at least one National Spelling Bee winnerâperhaps meerschaum (1950), pococurante (2003), or the dreamy-sounding shalloonâstrikes a chord with you, even if you have no idea what it means.
logorrhea
(1999): âpathologically excessive and often incoherent talkativenessâ
On multiple occasions, the National Spelling Bee has ended, appropriately, with a word that has to do with words or language. In 1958 Jolitta Schlehuber spelled syllepsis, a literary device exemplified by the shifting sense of the word âlostâ in the sentence âIâve lost my hair and my mind.â In 1997 Rebecca Sealfon won by excitedly shouting each letter in the word euonym, which means âa name well suited to the person, place, or thing named.â And after spelling one word after another to reach the final round, Nupur Lala may have been amused to succeed with âlogorrhea,â derived from the Greek logos (word) + rhoia (flow).