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The words weren’t always this hard.
When students first battled the dictionary in a National Spelling Bee in 1925, the winning speller knew the winning word because it was a plant in his family’s Kentucky garden.
Two years ago, the last time that spellers competed to win the Scripps national bee, one winner was asked about an adjective related to a hypothetical force proposed by a Prussian scientist in the 19th century.
Already this year, nearly 200 competitors have been eliminated from the 2021 bee. Here’s a sampling of the words that have given some of those spellers trouble, and of winning words from the decades when the spelling bee was less of a labyrinth of loan words and schwas.
Definitions are drawn from Merriam-Webster, the dictionary partner of the Scripps spelling bee, and sentences come from the New York Times archive, where possible. (Example sentences that do not end with a publication date are inventions.)
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