Glossary of Spelling Bee terms (released 2021) (2024)

FAQs

What dictionary does spelling bee use? ›

Merriam-Webster Unabridged is the official dictionary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and every word from the competition will come from this source.

Perfect Pangram — A pangram that uses each letter only once, e.g., a seven-letter pangram.

Each puzzle is guaranteed to have at least one pangram, which awards the player the largest number of points when found. If the player finds all of the possible words in a given puzzle, they achieve the title of "Queen Bee".

The puzzles never include the letter S, because then, almost every word players find could be made plural. But you can be on the lookout for plural forms of words that don't include an S, like "teeth" and "children."

Contestant will say the letters clearly and distinctly enough for the judges and pronouncer to determine spelling. Contestant should indicate appropriate capitalization, and say “space” when given a compound word such as “United States” or say “hyphen” when given a hyphenated word such as “great-grandfather.” 10.

By repeating a word after having spelled it, a speller indicates that he/she is completely done with his/her turn. speller would be allowed to start over because he/she did not repeat the word after spelling it initially.

Some of the hard spelling bee words for kids are liaison, chauffeur, cerise, euonym, conscientious, accommodate, macerate, rapport, bourgeoisie, qualification, accommodation, implementation, education, creation, fundamentals, functionality, etc.

What are 20 tricky words in English? ›

The 7 letters can be repeated any number of times. In each game, one letter is required and must be included in any word. In each game there is at least 1 pangram, which is a word that includes all 7 letters at least once. Players get points based on the length of each word they can spell.

How often does every letter in the alphabet appear in a sentence? That's exactly what makes a “pangram” special. The most well-known such phrase is: “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.”

He took on the age-old pangram 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' (32 letters) and challenged it with a new, shorter one. A pangram is a sentence that contains all 26 alphabets of the English language.

About 54 percent of the bee's words came from Latin, Middle English, French or New Latin. (It's worth noting that many words that come to us from Latin were filtered through Latin from Greek, or through French from Latin, and so on.

spelling bee. noun [ C ] /ˈspel·ɪŋ ˌbi/ Add to word list Add to word list. a competition in which people, often students, try to spell increasingly difficult words until all but one make a mistake.

The puzzles never include the letter S, because then, almost every word players find could be made plural. But you can be on the lookout for plural forms of words that don't include an S, like "teeth" and "children."

A spelling bee is a competition in which contestants compete in spelling a variety of words in English.