Scripps National Spelling Bee
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The Scripps National Spelling Bee (formerly known as the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee and commonly referred to simply as the National Spelling Bee) is a highly competitive annual spelling bee. It is run on a not-for-profit basis by The E. W. Scripps Company and is held in the ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Washington hotel in Washington, D.C. Historically, the competition has been open to, and remains open to, the winners of sponsored American regional spelling bees. Over the years, the competition has been opened to contestants from Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, New Zealand, Guam, Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Bahamas. Participants from countries other than the United States must be regional spelling bee competition winners as well. In recent years, the Championship Finals have aired live on ABC from 8:00 PM to after 10:00 p.m. EDT.
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[edit] History
The National Spelling Bee was formed in 1925 as a consolidation of numerous local spelling bees, organized by The Courier-Journal in Louisville and having nine competitors. Later, the E.W. Scripps Company acquired the rights to the program. The bee is held in late May and/or early June of each year. (Noah Webster whose spelling rules codified American English, died on May 28, 1843 so the late May timing of the Bee is a fitting historic tribute as well as being a post-standardized testing period in the academic year.) It is open to students who have not yet completed the eighth grade, reached their 15th birthday, nor won a previous National Spelling Bee. Its goal is educational: not only to encourage children to perfect the art of spelling, but also to help enlarge their vocabularies and widen their knowledge of the English language.
An insect bee is featured prominently on the logo of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The origin of the word "bee" as used in "spelling bee" is unclear. "Bee" refers to "a gathering", where people join together in an activity[1]. While the similarity between these human social gatherings and the social nature of bees is evident, recent thinking is that the origin of this sense of "bee" is related to the word "been" [2]. But the link between spelling and bees seems to reach some kind of historical exaltation in the work of under-celebrated natural history genius the Rev. Charls Butler, who combined the study of bees with early attempts to reform English spelling.
The Bee is the nation’s largest and longest-running educational promotion, administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company and 267 sponsors in the United States, Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Guam, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.
Sponsorship is available on a limited basis to daily and weekly newspapers serving English-speaking populations around the world. Each sponsor organizes a spelling bee program in its community with the cooperation of area school officials: public, private, parochial, charter, virtual, and home schools.
Schools enroll with the national office to ensure their students are eligible to participate and to receive the materials needed to conduct classroom and school bees. During enrollment, school bee coordinators receive their local sponsor’s program-specific information—local dates, deadlines, and participation guidelines.
The official study booklet is available free online[3].
The champion of each sponsor’s final spelling bee advances to the Scripps National Spelling Bee competition in Washington, D.C.
The company "Hexco Academic" has no real affiliation with the Scripps National Spelling Bee [4].
[edit] The spelling bee competition
[edit] Qualifying Regional Competitions
To qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a speller must win a regional competition. Each region may set its own rules for a spelling bee. Regional rules may not correspond exactly with the national spelling bee.
Most school and regional bees (known to Scripps as "local spelling bees") use the official study booklet. Until 1994, the study booklet was known as "Words of the Champions"; from 1994 to 2006, the study booklet was the category-based "Paideia", and in 2007 was changed to the 701-word "Spell It!". The current booklet is published by Merriam-Webster in association with the National Spelling Bee. "Spell It!" contains 701 words, divided primarily by language of origin, along with exercises and activities in each section. This booklet will be changed yearly. Bees preliminary to the regional level mostly use the School Pronouncer's Guide which contains a collection of Spell It! words as well as 'surprise words', words not in Spell It! but in Scripps' official dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged.
The regional bees are given a Sponsor Bee Guide by Scripps. There are two volumes, which each contain Spell It! words as well as surprise words. However, any official bee, regional or not, can choose not to use the words from Spell It!.
[edit] Sponsors
To participate in the national competition, a speller must be sponsored. Scripps has 280 sponsors (mostly newspapers) from the U.S., Canada, Bahamas, New Zealand, and Europe covering a certain area and conducting their own regional spelling bees to send spellers to the national level.
[edit] National competition Format
[edit] Round One
Round One used to consist of a 25-word multiple-choice written test. One word on the written test is taken from Spell It!, the official study booklet; Dr. Jacques Bailly, the Bee's official pronouncer, pronounces each word, its language of origin, definition, and usage in a sentence. Round Two is an oral round in which all spellers spell a word from the Bee's official dictionary, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, which has over 476,000 entries.
However, as of 2008, changes have been made in the formatting of this test. Now referred to as the "Round One Test", it consists of 50 words, 25 of which are deemed "score words". The score words are the only words that will count towards a speller's overall score, and their status is undisclosed until the actual results announcement. This test is taken electronically (on a computer), and spellers are allowed to take it throughout the first few days of 'Bee Week'. The only rule addressing possible discussion of words among spellers is that such is not allowed.
Each correct score word on the Round One written test is worth one point.
[edit] Round Two
Round two is an oral round. Every speller participates and has a chance to take the stage. A correct oral spelling in Round Two is worth three points. The judges total the scores from the Round One test and the oral round of spelling to reach the speller's score. A "maximum of 100" standard is then applied. Starting at 28, the highest score possible, spellers at each consecutive scoring level are added until a sum of no more than 100 spellers has been attained. All remaining spellers are eliminated and tied for the same place.
[edit] Round Three
Beginning in Round Three, each speller participates in a single-elimination oral round, and is given one word to spell. If a speller spells incorrectly, he or she is eliminated. If he or she spells correctly, he or she moves on to the next round.
[edit] Remaining Rounds
Rounds continue until a champion is declared. If, at the end of a particular round, there is only one speller remaining, he or she must correctly spell one additional word to win. If he or she misspells his or her word, then all spellers who were present at the beginning of the previous round return, and the next round begins. If there are two or three spellers remaining at the beginning of a round, the pronouncer moves to the Championship Words section of the word list. The spellers alternate spelling words from this list of 25 words until only one speller remains. However, if all 25 Championship Words are exhausted before a champion is declared, then all remaining spellers are declared co-champions.
[edit] Regulations of Oral rounds
Before 2004, spellers were not asked to spell any word until the judges deemed that the word has been clearly pronounced and identified by the speller; only then would the judges force a speller to begin spelling. Starting in 2004, the Bee adopted new rules.
A speller is given two minutes and thirty seconds from when a word is first pronounced to spell a word in its entirety. The first two minutes are known as "Regular Time", the final thirty seconds is known as "Finish Time". During this time limit, a speller is allowed to ask the pronouncer for the following information:
- The definition of the word
- The word's part of speech
- The word's usage in a sentence
- The word's language(s) of origin (not the complete etymology, even though some spellers refer to the language(s) of origin as the etymology)
- Alternate pronunciations of the word
- Alternate definitions of the word
- Whether or not the word contains a specified root; this may only be asked providing the speller can state the root in question, the root's language of origin, and the root's definition.
Once Regular Time has expired, a chime will sound, and the judges will inform the speller that Finish Time has begun. The speller gets the benefit of watching a clock count down from thirty seconds, as no timing devices are allowed onstage. No more requests may be made to the pronouncer, and the speller must begin spelling the word. Any speller that exceeds the time limit is automatically eliminated on the grounds that judges will not acknowledge any letters given by the speller after the end of Finish Time.
A speller is allowed once during the bee to ask for Bonus Time which is a one minute continuation of Regular Time. Bonus Time must be requested before Finish Time commences.
A speller is also allowed to start over spelling a word, however, he or she may not change the letters they have already said. Doing so counts as a misspell and automatic elimination.
Any speller that exhausts Regular Time twice will be subjected to Abbreviated Regular Time (90 seconds) instead of Regular Time.
[edit] Spelling bee of the current year
| Year | Competition Details |
| 2008 | 81st Competition |
[edit] Recent spelling bees
| Year | Competition Details |
| 2005 | 78th Competition |
| 2006 | 79th Competition |
| 2007 | 80th Competition |
[edit] Champions and winning words
[edit] Prizes
The winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee is awarded a $30,000 cash prize and an engraved loving cup trophy from Scripps, a $2,500 savings bond and reference library from Merriam-Webster, $3,800 in reference works from Encyclopædia Britannica, and a $5,000 cash prize from the Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation.
All spellers receive a commemorative watch (manufactured by TimeCal) from Scripps, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged on CD-ROM from Merriam-Webster, the Samuel Louis Sugarman Award which is a $100 U.S. Savings Bond, and a cash prize from Scripps. These cash prizes are determined based on the round in which the speller is eliminated. They range from $50 for a speller eliminated before the Quarterfinals to $12,500 for the second place finisher.
[edit] Criticism of the spelling bee
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[edit] Unfair Element of Chance
A critic may argue that the contest's format does not guarantee that the speller with the greatest vocabulary (of correctly spelled words) will win due to the element of chance involved in the competition. The word list for the competition is chosen in advance and spellers may deem some words less challenging than others. This leaves open the possibility that the speller with the greatest vocabulary could lose to a competitor with a smaller, but different vocabulary.
[edit] Homeschool advantage?
In recent years, several bees have been won by homeschooled students. Some suggest that they have an advantage because they can forgo their studies to prepare for the bee. Homeschoolers respond that, while they do have extra time to devote to spelling practice, such extra time does not come at the expense of their other studies; rather, lessons can be completed in a shorter time when one omits the travel time, change of classes, roll call, large class sizes, etc. that school students must endure. This is referenced in the South Park episode Hooked on Monkey Phonics, where two homeschooled kids win the local spelling bee.
[edit] School District qualification
In the 2007-2008 school year, several hundred schools were deemed "ineligible" because they incorrectly submitted paperwork to National Spelling Bee. Ultimately, the majority of those schools were able to resubmit applications, however, at least three students were initially denied a spot in the National Spelling Bee because of the error. NSB officials initially refused to reconsider the position, saying it was ultimately up to the local districts to determine eligibility, but at least one student was eventually allowed to compete. [5][6]
[edit] Publicity
[edit] In film
[edit] Documentary
The 2002 Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound follows eight competitors, including eventual national winner Nupur Lala, through the 1999 competition.
[edit] Fiction
The 2005 film Bee Season, based on Myla Goldberg's novel, follows a young girl's journey through various levels of spelling bee competition to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, as did the film Akeelah and the Bee the following year. Contestants in the Broadway show The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are competing for a spot in the National Spelling Bee. The 2007 novel Spelldown by Karon Luddy is a fictional account of a South Carolina girl's journey from the Shirley County spelling championships to the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
[edit] Nonfiction
The book American Bee, by James Maguire, profiles 5 spellers who made it to the final rounds of the competition: Samir Patel, Katharine Close, Aliya Deri, Jamie Ding, and Marshall Winchester, as well as giving an overview of the history of the bee.[7]
[edit] References
- ^ Online Etyomology Dictonary
- ^ What is the origin of the term spelling bee?
- ^ Spell It!
- ^ The Buzz about Bee Season 2007–2008
- ^ Error Keeps Girl From Spelling Bee, KMBC-TV, 2008-03-24. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
- ^ Girl Gets To Compete In Spelling Bee After All, KMBC-TV, 2008-03-25
- ^ Bruno, Debra. "Word Nerds: Superbright youngsters who vie to make the best-speller list", Chicago Sun Times, 2006-05-28. Retrieved on 2007-02-26.
[edit] External links
- Official website of the Scripps National Spelling Bee
- 2008 Spelling Bee Press Release
- Final rounds of 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee to be broadcast live on ABC during primetime (press release)
- Related media sites
- When Spelling Bee Champs Grow Up on Time.com (a division of Time Magazine)
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