Easy and intermediate level words can usually be spelled out phonetically, but more advanced spelling words need to be memorized. So, how does one get good enough at spelling to compete in a national spelling bee like the elite level Scripps spelling bee? In a word: study. The pressure put on elite spellers during a spelling bee can be intense.
SPELLING BEE WORDS TV
Spelling bees, particularly the Scripps National Spelling Bee, have been compared to sporting events with competitors sweating it out in front of a crowd and TV cameras all over the place. These words sometimes become common in everyday use, but they are also considered fair game for spelling bee competitions. The English language contains a lot of loan words from other languages including Spanish, French, and German. These words become more complex and sometimes it seems the spelling rules go out the window.
SPELLING BEE WORDS HOW TO
As students progress through grade levels, they are expected to know how to spell an increasing number of words. Starting in preschool, children learn how to spell and use basic words. Here’s a list of the hardest spelling bee words from the trickiest modern languages, as well as their phonetic pronunciations.English spelling, like English grammar, can take years to develop and master. Every year we are inspired by watching these kids grapple with the toughest words in the Bee and we hope this list gives them an extra boost of confidence. “For us at Babbel, the porous nature of linguistics provides endless drama how we borrow, loan, tweak, and revamp words from other countries and cultures in our ongoing quest for better communication. “This was a fascinating analysis - we would not have expected the two languages most closely related to English to be those that caused the greatest trouble,” said Julie Hansen, CEO US of Babbel. Words directly descended from Old English or Middle English accounted for 2 percent of knockout final-round words. In comparison, our direct linguistic ancestry is a bit more innocuous from a spelling bee standpoint. In second and third place was German (7 percent) and Italian (6 percent). Taking modern languages into account, French was the toughest root language to contend with, accounting for 19 percent of all misspelled words. This was followed by words related to medicine, the arts, and political or legal topics (13 percent, 8 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Nature and natural science words account for 38 percent of misspelled words.
Moreover, many scientific, medical and legal terms trace their origins back to Greek and Latin roots. Words with Latin etymologies were the most common stumbling blocks in the final round (27 percent of all words) followed by Ancient Greek (21 percent). And after analyzing a decade’s worth of the hardest spelling bee words - 398 toughies that have stumped contestants in the final round, to be exact - we’ve narrowed things down a bit.įor one, classical languages are responsible for the largest share of misspelled words from the Bee’s final rounds. We partnered with Merriam-Webster, the official word source for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, to investigate the source of the trickiest spelling quandaries in the English language. Since the sounds of French and German are different from those of English, this adds an extra dimension to the difficulty of spelling these words - on top of the fact that English spelling isn’t truly phonetic in the first place.” “With words from European languages, the more recent the borrowing, the more likely it is that its spelling is unchanged or nearly unchanged in English. “English has always borrowed words from other languages, and once they are found in our dictionaries, they are considered to be English words,” said Peter Sokolowski, Editor at Large of Merriam-Webster. Is it any small wonder, then, that certain root languages produce the hardest spelling bee words? The English language contains innumerable loan words that come from Spanish, Old Norse, French, Greek and beyond. Most languages don’t develop in a vacuum, and English is no exception.