50 Fun Facts About Spelling

Which word did 11-year-old Frank Neuhauser spell to win the first National Spelling Bee in 1925?

The bee was started by the Louisville Courier-Journal as a merger of local contests; Scripps took over sponsorship in 1941.

Which newspaper founded the National Spelling Bee in 1925?

The E. W. Scripps Company has run it since 1941; the finals are held near Washington, D.C. each late May or early June.

How many contestants shared the Scripps National Spelling Bee title in 2019, when the word list ran out?

The 'octochamps' prompted a new spell-off tiebreaker from 2021: spell as many words as you can in 90 seconds.

2021 spelling bee champion Zaila Avant-garde also holds Guinness records in which sport?

She won with 'murraya'; first prize is $50,000.

Which 1985 champion began the long run of Indian American winners at the National Spelling Bee?

Nupur Lala's 1999 win was later featured in the documentary Spellbound.

Under Scripps rules, a speller must be under 15 and must not have gone beyond which year of school?

The finals feature vocabulary questions as well as spelling since the 2010s.

Which 2006 Keke Palmer film is about a South Los Angeles girl in the National Spelling Bee?

Spellbound was the 2002 documentary that followed eight real spellers to the finals.

The 'bee' in spelling bee comes from an old word for what?

It probably derives from a dialect word 'been' meaning help given by neighbours; 'spelling match' is recorded from 1808 and 'spelling bee' from 1850.

Which organisation held the first countrywide US spelling bee, in Cleveland in 1908?

That contest did not become annual; the continuous national bee dates from 1925.

The made-up word 'ghoti' is meant to be pronounced like which English word?

gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation; the joke is often pinned on George Bernard Shaw but is older.

The earliest known use of 'ghoti' appears in an 1855 letter from Charles Ollier to which writer?

Ollier's son William had proposed the spelling; James Joyce alluded to it in Finnegans Wake and it is the Klingon word for fish.

What is a four-letter combination like 'ough', with its many pronunciations, called?

The two-letter 'ou' alone can stand for nine different vowel sounds depending on the word.

English spelling largely froze in the late 15th century, just before which change to long vowels?

The arrival of printing fixed Middle English spellings just as the vowels moved, which is why 'name' no longer rhymes with 'calm'.

Which country has an official academy that regulates spelling, something England has never had?

The lack of an English equivalent to the Academie francaise is one reason spelling reform never stuck.

Noah Webster popularised American spellings such as color and center by doing what?

Critics point out he did not originate them; his 1828 dictionary listed 70,000 words, 12,000 never before in a dictionary.

Webster's Blue-Backed Speller of 1783 had sold roughly how many copies by 1890?

It was the most popular American book of its time and drilled generations of schoolchildren in spelling.

How old was Noah Webster when An American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828?

He had begun the work in 1807 and finished the manuscript in Cambridge, England, in January 1825.

The 'i before e except after c' rule first appeared in print in a spelling manual of which year?

James Stuart Laurie's Manual of English Spelling; the longer version adds 'or when sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh'.

Which of these words obeys the 'i before e except after c' rule?

Weird and seize break it with no c; species and science break it by keeping ie after c.

In 2009 which body advised that 'the i before e except after c rule is not worth teaching'?

Leonard Wheat's 1932 study of 3,876 words had already found the rule's exceptions outweighed its usefulness.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'without doubt'?

Mispronunciation is one of the biggest causes of misspelling; 'defiantly' is a real word that autocorrect loves to substitute.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to provide lodging'?

Two c's and two m's; doubled consonants are one of the most common traps in English.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to keep apart'?

A useful trick: there is 'a rat' in separate.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'very small'?

It comes from the Latin minusculus, related to minus, not to 'mini'.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to replace'?

It is the only common English word ending in -sede; proceed and succeed take -ceed, and precede takes -cede.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'an instance of something happening'?

Double r and double... no, single e: occur, occurred, occurrence.

Which is the correct spelling of the thousand-year period?

Two l's and two n's, from Latin mille (thousand) and annus (year).

Which is the correct spelling of the word for a go-between?

The French loanword keeps its double i; it is a frequent flyer on lists of misspelled words.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'to make someone feel awkward'?

Two r's and two s's; the French embarras has only one s.

Which is the correct spelling of the verb meaning to spell a word wrongly?

The word is famously misspelled itself: mis + spell keeps both s's.

What is named as one of the most common causes of misspelling?

Homophones, typing errors, personal names, foreign spellings and apostrophes are the other listed culprits.

How many letters are in pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis?

The lung-disease name was deliberately coined in the 1930s to be the longest word.

Floccinaucinihilipilification, the longest non-technical word in major dictionaries, means what?

Its 29 letters have been in use since 1741; antidisestablishmentarianism runs it close at 28.

Which nine-letter word is usually cited as the longest English word with only one vowel?

'Rhythms' has no a, e, i, o or u at all but relies on y.

According to a computer study, which 20-letter word is the longest likely to turn up in everyday prose?

Ross Eckler's research suggested ordinary text tops out around 20-22 letters.

Which is cited as the longest single-syllable word in English?

The British double-l spelling gives it 11 letters; the longest palindrome cited is 'rotavator'.

The full chemical name of the protein titin runs to roughly how many letters?

Most linguists do not count systematic chemical names as words at all.

Which broadcaster took over the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals from ESPN in 2022?

The change was pitched as making the bee free to watch without a cable subscription.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning 'required'?

One c, two s's: a shirt has one collar and two sleeves.

Which is the correct spelling of the word meaning strange or uncanny?

One of the best-known exceptions to 'i before e'; it originally meant fate, as in Shakespeare's weird sisters.

In 2019 the Scripps National Spelling Bee winner's cash prize was raised to how much?

The very first winner in 1925 took home $500 in gold pieces. Winners also get an engraved loving cup and a Merriam-Webster reference library.

Before the 2020 pandemic cancellation, the national bee had last been called off in which year?

It was suspended from 1943 to 1945 because of World War II, the only other gap since the contest began in 1925.

Which animal's name did Noah Webster add to his dictionary because British dictionaries lacked it?

His 1828 dictionary held seventy thousand words, twelve thousand of which had never appeared in any published dictionary.

The silent 'l' in 'could' was added to mirror the spelling of which two words?

Seventeenth-century scholars also slipped a 'b' into debt and doubt and a 'p' into receipt to flaunt Latin roots that were never pronounced.

The 2021 national finals were held at an ESPN sports complex in which state?

The pandemic pushed the contest out of its usual Maryland resort for a year. Since 2026 it has been held at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington.

Jacques Bailly, the Scripps bee's official pronouncer since 2003, is also a former what?

Spellers may ask him for a word's definition, part of speech, language of origin and a sentence, but only while the traffic light is green or yellow.

Which unabridged dictionary is the Scripps bee's official reference?

Regional bees use the 4,000-word Words of the Champions booklet, sorted mostly by language of origin, but 'off-list' words come straight from the big book.

Since 2023, how long does a national bee speller get from hearing a word to finishing it?

A traffic light on a monitor turns yellow with 30 seconds left and red at 15, when the speller must start spelling and can ask no more questions.

Which English king began using English instead of Latin or French for official letters in 1417?

At the time Latin had one spelling for 'right', Old French six, and Middle English 77. Standardisation took roughly 500 more years.

Early printers added the silent 'h' to 'ghost' under the influence of which language?

Caxton-era typesetters trained in the Low Countries imported their habits. The word had usually been spelled 'gost' before then.