National Spelling Bee competitors face ‘short, tricky words’ as quarter-finals set

A four-letter word helped Shradha Rachamreddy finish third in last year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee.

As the remaining spellers dwindled, Shradha was given ‘orle’, a heraldry term meaning several small charges arranged to form a border within the edge of a square. It sounds exactly like “oral”. Shradha went along with “orel” and heard the dreaded bell indicating a misspelled word.

“I made it too complicated,” Shradha said almost a year later. “It looks simple. It should have been simple, but I missed it.”

The good news for Shradha was that she almost won it all when she was in seventh grade, which meant she had another year of eligibility. The 14-year-old from San Jose, California, returned as one of 245 spellers participating in this year’s bee, which kicked off with Tuesday’s preliminary rounds at a convention center outside Washington, DC.

Like other returning spellers, Shradha tried to learn from her mistake. This year she spent part of her studies on the types of words she often misses.

“I missed a four-letter word, so my weakness is usually those super short, tricky words, and I’ve been working on putting those together into one list,” Shradha said. “I’m trying to identify the words that are likely to appear. If they’re not spelled the way they sound, then I think, “Okay, it’s fair game,” and I study that.

Learning as many words as possible is not a foolproof approach. No one in the bee’s nearly century-long history has managed to memorize the more than 500,000 words in Webster’s Unabridged dictionary, any of which can be selected for inclusion by Scripps’ word panel of former bee champions, linguists and other experts.

Last year’s champion, Dev Shah, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that to become a champion speller you must accept being asked a word you don’t know — and be calm enough to to find out.

“The skill of guessing is everything,” he wrote.

Aryan Khedkhar, a 13-year-old from Rochester Hills, Michigan, who tied for fifth place last year, breaks tricky words into categories.

“There are words with roots and words without roots that you just have to remember. The ones you need to remember, I use language patterns. That really helps. If there are no language patterns, I just try to use the simplest way possible,” Aryan said. ‘That’s what the spelling bee is about. It’s not about knowing as many words as possible.”

Aditi Muthukumar said she tried to address her weaknesses using words derived from French or the many languages ​​of the Indian subcontinent. But the 13-year-old from Westminster, Colorado, expects she’ll have to confront a word she doesn’t know during her final bee.

“I mean, probably,” she said, “and I hope I’m okay with it.”

This year’s three players from Ghana showed up in uniform: black turtlenecks, white pants, shoes decorated with the Ghanaian flag. The centerpiece: custom-designed jackets with sleeves in woven kente fabric.

“We have to carry it,” said speller Abena Kwaffo, laughing.

Spelling is an individual pursuit, but Team Ghana was united by national pride. Ghana has been sending a contingent of spellers for years, long enough that former competitor Darren Sackey is coaching this year’s trio.

“It’s teamwork. The spellers work very hard together,” says Salome Dzakpasu, the Ghanaian program director. “Training together at the weekend, during the week, sometimes in the evening, learning to combine school work and preparing for the bee.”

While the bee’s past quarter century has been dominated by the descendants of Indian immigrants, the only international champion was Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998. Ghana’s best finish was a tie for 18th by Afua Ansah in 2016.

N’Dom Darko-Asare, a Ghanaian seventh-grader participating for the third time, feels more comfortable than ever.

“Maybe you’re afraid of being on stage. Once you’ve been there, it doesn’t intimidate you so much,” says 13-year-old N’Dom.

Since 2021, on-stage spellers have been asked multiple-choice vocabulary questions, and before that, vocabulary was part of a written test that determined which spellers made it to the semi-finals.

Nevertheless, Scripps treated “vocabulary” as a dirty word, using a euphemism instead: “word meaning.” This meant that the procrastinators Jacques Bailly and Rev. Brian Sietsema were forced to use the difficult construction when introducing the vocabulary questions: ‘Your word that means word is…’

In Tuesday’s preliminary rounds, Sietsema took care of the pronunciation tasks of the first group of spellers. Those who spelled their first word correctly remained at the microphone while Sietsema said to them, to give an example, “Your vocabulary word is ‘terrarium’.” (Jordin Oremosu, a 14-year-old speller from Florida, giggled with relief when asked to define that word.)

“There were discussions about it,” Bailly said, and while he was not responsible for the change, he added, “I always thought it was supposed to be ‘vocabulary’.”