![]() ![]() “They’ve started to understand they have to push further into the dictionary,” says Shourav Dasari, a 20-year-old former speller and a co-founder with his older sister Shobha of SpellPundit, which sells study guides and hosts a popular online bee. Place names, trademarks, words with no language of origin: As long as a word isn’t archaic or obsolete, it’s fair game. The panel also began pulling words avoided in the past. The wild-card program was scrapped, and Scripps added onstage vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker. And it made format changes designed to identify a sole champion. It brought in younger panelists more attuned to the ways contemporary spellers study and prepare. Scripps, however, didn’t fundamentally change the way the word panel operates. The bee ended in an eight-way tie, and there was no shortage of critics. Scripps had to use the toughest words on its list just to cull to a dozen finalists. In 2019, a confluence of factors - among them, a wild-card program that allowed multiple spellers from competitive regions to reach nationals - produced an unusually deep field of spellers. The process seemed to go smoothly through the 2010s, even amid a proliferation of so-called “minor league” bees, many catering to offspring of highly educated, first-generation Indian immigrants - a group that has come to dominate the competition. The panel meets a few times a year, often virtually, to go over words, edit definitions and sentences, and weed out problems. ![]() “I have no fear about running out (of words), and I feel good about that.” HOW THE BEE HAS EVOLVED “They are fun and challenging for me and they make me smile, and I know if I was a speller I would be intimidated by that word,” says the 28-year-old Mishra, who just finished his MBA at Harvard. He gravitates toward “the harder end of the spectrum.” ![]() Mishra pulls his submissions from his own list, which he started when he was a 13-year-old speller. Those who submit words, like Trinkle and Mishra, are given assignments throughout the year to come up with a certain number at a certain level of difficulty. Some work to ensure that the definitions, parts of speech and other accompanying information are correct others are tasked with ensuring that words of similar difficulty are asked at the right times in the competition others focus on crafting the bee’s new multiple-choice vocabulary questions. “The best words kind of happen to you as you’re scrolling around through the dictionary.” If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle says. “The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways - which the spellers know as well. Now, more often than not she goes directly to the source - Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. And as they got smarter and smarter, they got more in contact with each other and were studying off the same lists, it became harder to hold a bee with those same types of words,” Trinkle says. “Our raison d’etre was to teach spellers a rich vocabulary that they could use in their daily lives. Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist. ![]()
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