Spellers Reach a D-E-A-D-L-O-C-K
February 25, 2014
A marathon spelling competition between two students from Missouri was temporarily halted last weekend because the judges ran out of words. Sophia Hoffman, a fifth-grader at Highland Park Elementary School in Lee’s Summit, and Kush Sharma, a seventh-grader at Frontier School of Innovation in Kansas City, were the last students standing in the Jackson County spelling bee, trying to win a seat at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., in May. The judges ended the battle after an astonishing 66 rounds, having run through the official list of 300 words plus 20 more picked from the dictionary. At that point, Hoffman and Sharma had succesfully nailed such words as fantoccini, scherzo, schadenfreude, and herbaceous. The Jackson County spelling bee in 2013 lasted only 21 rounds.
Mary Olive Thompson, outreach manager for Kansas City Public Library, told CNN, “We didn’t want to just go through the dictionary and give them more words. We feared that someone would get a word that was too easy while the other would get an extremely difficult word. We wanted to be a bit more calculated and neutral, and we wanted to give each an equal opportunity.” In addition, the judges said they were tired. A rematch is scheduled for early March.
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The World Book Dictionary features more than 225,000 entries, 3000 illustrations, notes on how to use prefixes, suffixes, capitalization and punctuation, pronunciation guides, and more.
According to the National Spelling Bee website, the word spelling bee in an American term that first appeared in print in 1875, though it almost certainly had been used orally for several years before that. The word bee has long been used to describe social gatherings for work or amusement, such as a sewing bee, quilting bee, or husking bee.
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