Can You Use It In A Sentence?

Just in time for tonight’s Scripps National Spelling Bee finals, Ben Blatt runs the numbers on which words are most likely to knock a contestant out of the running:

Thanks to the folks at the National Spelling Bee (who sent me complete records for the last decade) and Merriam-Webster (which provided their pronunciations), I’ve been able to compile statistics on all of the words that have been spelled correctly (there are 5,042 of them) and incorrectly (1,409) during the traditional oral rounds. (I didn’t look at words that were part of the bee’s written test.) So, what’s most likely to throw a speller off?

You might suspect that longer words are more likely to trip up contestants. The two longest words in the data set were 17 letters apiece: triboluminescence and idiosyncratically, both of which sent their spellers home. But long words aren’t always so tricky. Five of the eight 16-letter words were spelled correctly, Michelangelesque and sphygmomanometer among them. And of the two shortest words to appear in the spelling bee in the last 10 years, gbo and rya, only the former was spelled correctly.

Reuben Fischer-Baum uses Google Ngram to show that the winning words have gotten more obscure over the years, from “therapy” in 1939 to “cymotrichous” in 2011:

Of the 15 rarest winners in bee history, 11 have come since 1995 … [The] five top words stumped Google Ngram, and didn’t appear in the corpus at all in the year prior to the bee. “Esquamulose”—meaning “not covered in scales“—wins rarest word, period; it doesn’t appear in the corpus for any year, from 1800 to 2008 (a word has to appear in at least 40 books to show up in the database). Appropriately, “esquamulose” was only a winning word in a technical sense. The 1962 contest ended in a tie after both finalists failed to spell it correctly, the first and only time that the bee has ended in such as way.