Beyond spelling

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, May 30th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: o-r-t-h-o-g-r-a-p-h-y, orthography. That’s a fancy way to say spelling. The Scripps National Spelling Bee is underway in National Harbor, Maryland. The finals air on ION tonight.

WORLD reporter Jenny Rough talked with some former contestants.

MUSIC: [Maxixe dance]

CORRIE LOEFFLER: There’s a word I remember learning when I was a kid. Maxixe.

JENNY ROUGH: Corrie Loeffler is the executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. She’s worked for the bee for 18 years.

LOEFFLER: M-a-x-i-x-e. It’s a Brazilian ballroom dance. And I was like, I’ve got to see what this dance is.

In the mid-1990s, when she was in middle school, she competed as a contestant three years in a row. She says studying for the bee was illuminating.

LOEFFLER: I grew up in this small town in central California. Not a ton of worldly experiences but if I opened up the dictionary, I could learn about all kinds of things that piqued my curiosity. Your curiosity can take you anywhere with just learning some words for a spelling bee.

The spelling bee competition starts in local classrooms. Students can enter through eighth grade. At first, everyone studies the same initial list of 4,000 words. Regional competitions then narrow down the contestants. This year, 245 kids ages 8 to 15 made it to the national round. Here, at the preliminary stage, the bee adds more study words, bringing the list to 4,500.

LOEFFLER: But after that, when you get to the quarterfinals and beyond, it’s the entire dictionary that they’re responsible for.

Merriam-Webster unabridged, which has about half a million entries in it.

LOEFFLER: That’s why we’re able to have such a challenging competition.

Loeffler says one word is a favorite for a lot spellers:

LOEFFLER: Humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

Hawaii’s state fish.

LOEFFLER: Sounds like a whole roller coaster of a word. But really if you know the sounds that you’d typically use in words from Hawaiian, anybody could spell that word.

That’s why kids often ask the judges to give them the language of origin before they attempt to spell a word.

LOEFFLER: To have the most success, what you need to do is learn your roots, your Greek and Latin roots, and learn language patterns, so the sounds that letters make if they are used in certain languages.

For example, the 'k sound:

LOEFFLER: So a 'k in Hawaiian isn’t going to be a c or a c-h, it’s going to be a k.

That’s the key to the bee: roots and language of origin. Here’s an example from yesterday’s semi-finals:

AIDEN: Phaeoplast. Is this coming from the Greek phaios meaning dusky?

JUDGE: Yes.

AIDEN: Is this coming from the plastós meaning mold?

JUDGE: You’re on the right track.

AIDEN: Phaeoplast. p-h-a-e-o-p-l-a-s-t

JUDGE 2: That is correct.

Because English borrows so many words from other languages, mastering English is no easy task. It’s full of inconsistent pronunciations. Like the four-letter sequence o-u-g-h, which has at least six in American English: cough, tough, bough, dough, sought, through.

Even so, the bee tries to steer kids away from rote memorization and instead aims to help kids understand the actual meaning of words. To encourage that, the bee added in a new challenge in 2021: an on-stage oral vocabulary question.

LOEFFLER: A kid goes up, they get their first spelling word, and if they get that right they immediately get their vocabulary question.

JUDGE: Your word is quixotic. Someone described as quixotic tends to be (a) idealistic; (b) pessimistic; (c) sarcastic.

ALIYAH: (a) idealistic.

JUDGE 2: That is correct.

ANCHOR: Don Quixote dreamed the impossible dream.

If they miss, they’re out. But if they know their roots and language patterns—

LOEFFLER: A lot of times they can figure out what it means even if they’ve never seen the word before.

Blake Giddens won the national bee in 1983.

BLAKE GIDDENS: The word that I got at the end that the other kid missed at the end is ratatouille.

SKINNER: Ratatouille? They must be joking.

Ratatouille, a stew made of leftover vegetables. In 1983, it was an obscure French word. Now, kids know it from the Pixar film about a cartoon rat who becomes a chef.

Today, Giddens works as an engineer. But he’s still involved in the bee, most recently the pronouncer for the Fairfax County regional bee in Virginia.

For the national competition, pronouncers rely on many tools—like headphones or recordings that can be played back to make sure they can hear the difference between similar sounding letters, like d and b.

GIDDENS: They put a lot of effort into making it as fair as possible.

Giddens says the purpose of the bee is multifaceted: love of language; camaraderie among the families who participate. And this:

GIDDENS: One of the beauties of understanding language is knowing the right term to describe a certain situation.

Giddens says mastering the English language enables us to properly articulate our thoughts.

GIDDENS: You know, I was always a fan of William F. Buckley, and a lot of people thought he was ostentatious because he used these big words. But in reality I think he was looking for the exact word that described what he was trying to say.

Despite the manipulation of language in our culture today, this competition offers a glimmer of hope that kids are still learning that words matter.

JUDGE: Drusen. It’s from German.

ANCHOR: Could be a temptation to add a letter here. Thinking it may have been Anglicized from German.

JUDGE: Drusen is a plural noun. Drusen means small, transparent bodies usually separated into thin layers, sometimes appearing behind the retina of the eye.

ARYAN: d-r-u-s-i-n-e. Drusen.

AUDIO: [Bell]

JUDGE: Drusen is spelled d-r-u-s-e-n.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough. And yes, that’s R-o-u-g-h.

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