OXON HILL, Md.—With the ultimate pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Word Selection Panel stretching into the seventh hour, speakers don’t seem to care anymore.
Before panellists can debate the words chosen for the bee, they have to hear each word and its language of origin, a part of speech, definition, and example sentence read aloud.
At the tip of the meeting, keynote speaker Jacques Bailly and his colleagues – so measured of their pace and meticulous of their pronunciation throughout the bee – get the job done as quickly as possible.
No breaks. No apologies for mistakes.
By the point of this gathering, two days before the bee, the thesaurus is nearly complete. Each word has been checked by a panel and entered into the suitable round of the nearly 100-year-old annual competition to find the most effective speller within the English language.
For a long time, the work of the word panel was a closely guarded secret. This 12 months, Cincinnati-based media company Scripps granted The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their meeting in front of the bees, with the caveat that the AP won’t release the words unless they’re faraway from the list.
THEY ARE DIFFICULT IN WORDS
![Deputy Spokesperson Brian Sietsema attends the word panel pre-bee meeting to finalize the words of the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Sunday, May 28, 2023, at the National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919409.jpg?w=1024)
The 21 panellists sit around a makeshift rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked away in a convention center outside Washington, where the annual bee is held. They receive printouts containing the words 770 to 1110 – those used out and in of the semi-final rounds – with the instruction that these sheets usually are not allowed to leave the room.
Hearing the words aloud in front of your complete panel – laptops open to Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary – sometimes solves problems. That is what happened at the tip of Sunday’s meeting. Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion obstetrician/gynecologist who recently joined the panel, chimed in.
The word gleyde (pronounced “glide”), which suggests decrepit old horse and is barely utilized in Britain, has an almost homonym – glyde – with an identical but not an identical pronunciation and the identical meaning. Shivashankar says the spelling variant makes the word too confusing, and the remaining of the panel quickly agree to add gleyde altogether. It should not be used.
“Nice word, but goodbye,” says Kevin Moch.
![Saharsh Vuppala, 13, of Bellevue, Washington, competes in the finals of the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee competition.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011928289.jpg?w=1024)
For the panellists, the meeting is the culmination of a year-long strategy of making a thesaurus that may challenge but not embarrass the 230 junior and elementary-aged contestants – and ideally determine the champion inside the two-hour broadcast window for Thursday night’s finals.
The work of the panel has modified over the a long time.
From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire’s book “American Bee”, the creation of the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, director of Scripps Howard editorial promotions, after which by Harvey Elentuck, then an MIT student, for help from the list within the mid-Nineteen Seventies 12 months.
The panel was established in 1985. The present collaborative approach only took shape within the early Nineties. Bailly, the 1980 champion, joined in 1991.
“Harvey … made an entire list,” says Bailly. “I’ve never met him. I used to be just told, “You are the latest Harvey.”
THIS IS NOT JUST A CHOICE OF WORDS
![Pronouncer Jacques Bailly (left), Deputy Deputy Advocate Christian Axelgard and Kevin Moch gather for a speech panel meeting.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919408-1.jpg?w=1024)
This 12 months’s meeting is attended by five full-time bee employees and 16 contract panelists.
Positions are filled by word of mouth within the spelling community or panelist recommendations. 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, made most of her submissions by reading magazines akin to The Recent Yorker and The Economist.
![Deputy Pronouncer Christian Axelgard (left) and Frank Cahill talk during a speech panel meeting.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919497.jpg?w=1024)
“Our raison d’être was to teach orthographers a wealthy vocabulary that they might use in on a regular basis life. And as they got smarter, connected higher, and studied the identical lists, it became harder to keep the bee with the identical words,” says Trinkle.
Now he mostly goes directly to the source, Unabridged Merriam-Webster.
It’s easier than before.
“The dictionary is on the pc and will be easily searched in various ways – as spellers know too. In the event that they want to find all of the words that entered the language within the 1650s, they will try this, which I sometimes do,” says Trinkle. “The perfect words occur to you while you glance through a dictionary.”
![Associate Pronouncer Brian Sietsema listens to the debate on proposed word definitions and sentence usage.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919436.jpg?w=1024)
Not everyone on the panel sends words.
Some work to make sure that definitions, parts of speech, and other accompanying information are correct; others are tasked with ensuring that words of comparable difficulty are asked at the best time throughout the competition; others deal with creating latest multiple-choice vocabulary questions for the bee.
Those that submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given tasks all year long to give you a certain number at a certain difficulty level.
Mishra draws his entries from his own list, which he began when he was a 13-year-old speller. It leans towards the “harder end of the spectrum.”
“They’re fun and difficult for me, they make me smile, and I do know that if I used to be a speller, that word would intimidate me,” says Mishra, 28, who just accomplished an MBA from Harvard. “I’m not afraid of running out of (words) and I be ok with that.”
HOW THE BEE Evolved
![Crew members assemble the main stage ahead of the 2023 Scripps Nations Spelling Bee over the weekend.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919431.jpg?w=1024)
The panel meets several times a 12 months, often virtually, to discuss words, edit definitions and sentences, and fix issues.
The method seemed to run easily through the 2010s, even within the face of the proliferation of so-called minor league bees.lots of them cater to the first-generation offspring of well-educated Indian immigrants, a gaggle that has dominated the competition.
In 2019, a mix of things — including a wild card program that allowed many orthographers from competing regions to reach residents — created an incredibly vast orthography field. Scripps had to use the toughest words on his list to pick a dozen finalists.
The bee led to attract eightand there was no shortage critics.
![Discussion panel members proposed word definitions and sentence usage during the meeting to finalize the words of the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Sunday, May 28.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919407.jpg?w=1024)
Nevertheless, Scripps didn’t fundamentally change the way in which the word panel worked.
It attracted younger panellists who were more attuned to the ways modern spellers learn and prepare. And he made format changes to discover the one champion. The wild card program was scrapped, with Scripps adding on-stage vocabulary questions and a blitz draw.
The panel also began pulling out words that had been avoided up to now. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: so long as the word is not archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game.
“They began to understand that they needed to dig deeper into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and co-founder together with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and runs a preferred web bee. “Last 12 months we began seeing things like tribal names being among the hardest words within the dictionary.”
THERE IS PARTICULARITY IN ALL OF THIS
![Assistant speaker Brian Sietsema (left) and deputy speaker Christian Axelgard talk during a speech panel meeting.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919446-1.jpg?w=1024)
Panel members say they usually are not nervous about other bees or the proliferation of study materials and personal coaches. But these coaches and entrepreneurs spend a whole lot of time desirous about the words Scripps is probably going to use — often quite successfully.
Dasari says there are about 100,000 words within the dictionary which might be suitable for spelling bees. It ensures that 99% of the words on Scripps’ list are in SpellPundit materials.
Anyone who learns all these words is nearly guaranteed to win, says Dasari – but nobody has shown they will do it.
“I just do not know when anyone would give you the option to master an entire dictionary completely,” says Dasari.
![Crew members assemble the main stage in front of the bee.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919439.jpg?w=1024)
For the reason that bee resumed after the pandemic was canceled in 2020, the panel has been thoroughly scrutinized for vocabulary questions which have added whimsical elementknocking out among the most talented spellers, even in the event that they didn’t misspell a word.
Last 12 months’s champion, Harini Logan, was briefly removed on the word “pullulation” – only to be brought back a number of minutes later after arguing that her answer may very well be interpreted as correct.
“It gave us a way of how very, very careful we’ve got to be about crafting these questions,” says Ben Zimmer, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and lead writer of the words for the vocabulary rounds.
![Maggie Lorenz (left) and Kevin Moch attend a speech panel meeting.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/05/NYPICHPDPICT000011919428.jpg?w=1024)
Zimmer can be sensitive to criticism that some vocabulary questions assess cultural sophistication of spelling relatively than their mastery of linguistic roots and patterns.
He says this 12 months’s vocabulary questions have more clues to guide gifted spellers to their answers.
There’ll at all times be complaints concerning the wordlist, however the fundamental focus of the panel is to make the competition as fair as possible.
Missing hyphens or incorrect capitalization, confusion about singular and plural nouns or transitive and intransitive verbs – no doubt is simply too insignificant.
“It’s really problematic,” says Trinkle, pointing to a word that has a homonym with an identical definition.
Scripps editorial manager Maggie Lorenz agrees, “We’re going to completely undermine that word.”
Ben Nuckols has been handling the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012.