
What Makes the Spelling Bee So Hard - nafizh
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-the-spelling-bee-so-hard/
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bmelton
As a one-time national Scripps Bee competitor who ultimately lost out in an
early round to a (now-known to be) ridiculously easy word[1], this was a very
good article.

Point 1 (Length) can't be stressed enough, while point 2 (Latin) is not always
as helpful as you want it to be.

The one thing that isn't really covered there is that you have to know a whole
friggin lot to be competitive. Sure, spelling is just spelling, but having
effectively memorized the meager dictionaries that my poor upbringing brought
me access to, that doesn't begin to prepare you for Scripps, which is sure to
challenge you with words from most language origins, and are beyond the
memorization capabilities of all but the very best.

I wasn't a "contender" by any stretch of the imagination, and I never had any
coaching done, so I was at a strategic disadvantage as well as a skill
disadvantage of the others, but I remember how smart I was when going to the
library and trying to familiarize myself with Latin, Greek and other language
origins, if only to familiarize myself with the structure and which things
were most likely to reoccur so that, if challenged, I could at least make some
good guesses, but unless you're absolutely, positively dedicated, it's really,
really hard to know "enough" to do well.

[1] - The word was "paunchy", from the Latin "pantex", and borrowed from
French "panche" and Old Northern French "pance". None of the above have a 'u',
and neither did my spelling. Such was the pain of my failure, I now know this
without having to look it up.

~~~
bigjimmyk3
I remember reaching my state spelling bee and noticing that some of the other
kids had a book I had never seen. It turned out to be _Valerie's Spelling Bee
Supplement_ and when I got to the national bee almost every competitor had
one. I felt like the knife guy at the gunfight.

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lisper
The spelling bee seems to be a phenomenon unique to English because it is
entirely dependent on the byzantine (bordering on the perverse) structure of
the language.

[https://www.quora.com/Are-there-spelling-bees-in-
languages-o...](https://www.quora.com/Are-there-spelling-bees-in-languages-
other-than-English)

~~~
paozac
Definitely. I wonder if there will ever be an attempt to simplify (and make
more consistent) the english orthography, similar to the 1996 german
orthography reform.

~~~
xiaoma
Webster made just such an attempt and it was responsible for a lot of the
US/UK spelling divide.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-
reform](https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform)

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Udik
Well, listening to some of the examples in the article and trying my luck, the
first thing that comes to my mind is that maybe they should complement the
challenge- if not replace altogether- with a pronunciation bee. Opificer is
read as "huh-pificer", but the common pronunciation, and the only one that
makes sense to me, is "oh-pificer" (the stress varies freely as well in all
the examples I found online). Hechsher (presumably with a hard "ch" sound) is
pronounced heksher. The french word "Beurre" is happily pronounced "bur",
without any attempt to a french sound. Don't know enough Spanish tell the
correct pronunciation of Pejerrey but I'm pretty sure it's not "payray". If
this is how it works, it seems a double challenge: first guess which word
they're actually trying to pronounce, then write it down correctly.

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xiaoma
What makes it hard is that it's a tournament. A popular tournament of
_anything_ is hard.

