Lucy’s lopsided laundry line was
loaded with long and loopy letters.
from Ellsworth’s Extraordinary Electric Ears
and other Amazing Alphabetic Anecdotes
written and illustrated by Valorie Fisher
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2003
My dad was a good speller. He said he knew when his spelling was correct because it “looked right.” He claimed to be a good speller because he studied Latin in high school. I think he was just smart. He might have been able to win the National Spelling Bee. I think he never had the chance.
One hundred years ago today, nine spellers did participate in the first National Spelling Bee. That year, 1925, Frank Neuhauser (1913-2011) of Kentucky won the Bee by correctly spelling gladiolus. He was 11 years old when he won his $500 prize.
While millions of students qualified and participated, elimination rounds left a final pool of nine spellers, one for each participating sponsoring newspaper.
The contest has grown to include millions and millions of students from thousands of schools. This year, all fifty states are represented as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Department of Defense Schools in Europe. It is rare for spellers from outside the U.S. to compete. They respond to a special invitation or partnership. This year, students from the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Kuwait, and Nigeria will compete.
A Google search on “the best ways to study for a spelling test” showed guidelines, activities, and resources. I saw workbooks, worksheets of tricky words to memorize, word searches, homophones, vowel sounds, silent letters, alliteration (like Ellsworth Ears in today’s quote), and hundreds more.
After perusing several lists from Reading Rockets, YourDictionary, and TCKPublishing, I discovered no surprise. Success demands practice. That old adage, “practice makes perfect,” is about the most effective way to learn to spell.
Reading helps, too. I suspect that’s another reason why Dad’s words “looked right” to him. He saw them written correctly over and over.
Mneumonics are helpful. Jimminy Cricket sang E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A. I only get that spelling right when I sing it like I just did. At school we learned “A rat in the house might eat the ice cream” (Arithmetic) and “There’s a-rat in separate.” Accommodate is large enough for two sets of double letters.
According to Google’s own AI, the most often misspelled word in English is definitely. There is a finite way to spell definitely.
The word list to study for the Bee, arranged in several alphabetical lists from easiest to hardest, is right here. But word lists can get tedious.
Long words are fun. When we were young, we learned the word antidisestablishmentarianism. It’s a political position originated in 19th-century Britain opposing the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a made-up word popularized by Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in Disney’s Mary Poppins. But the word is older than that. Oxford English Dictionary claims Helen Herman recorded its first use in her March 10, 1931, column “A-muse-ings” in the Syracuse University Daily Orange. Ms. Herman says the word “implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, [and] wonderful.”
But the longest English word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolanoconiosis, is the medical name for a disease caused by breathing in quartz dust.
The longest place name in the US, Lake Chaubunagungamaug, is sometimes called Webster Lake. That’s what I’d call it. The native name is derived from a Nipmuc language and translates to “fishing place at the boundaries, neutral meeting grounds.”
Lots of interesting words are short, too. Agog, gizmo, idiom, loofah, muumuu, quirky, ruckus, syzygy, uvula, wonky, zephyr come to mind.
Spelling can be tricky. Most languages include homophones, homographs, and homonyms. These, themselves, are tricky, too. Here’s how to keep them straight.
Homo- is a prefix that means same, alike, similar. So a homophone, like a telephone, are words that sound the same but are not spelled the same. My favorite homophones are in a tie: discussed/disgust and gorgeous/gorges. I don’t have a favorite homograph. They are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Bow (and arrow) and bow (after a spectacular performance), for example.
Homonyms refer to homophones or homographs, or both.
Still with me?
I keep a list of interesting words on my desktop. It’s not easy to work most of them into a sentence, but that’s not what the list is for. Actually, I’m not sure it’s for anything. It just is. My list includes favorites like crepuscular and petrechor.
I guess I’m a little bit of a word nerd. I keep a list of opposites and a list of unusual phrases, too.
My favorite pair of opposites is dearth/plethora.
Here’s my post about unusual phrases from December 2023, "It's Idiomatic."
This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee will be its 97th. The Bee was canceled from 1943 to 1945 because of WWII and again in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The champion will be the 110th due to several two-way ties and an eight-way tie in 2019.
Find directions for tuning in (beginning today from 8 am to 4:40 pm EDT) at www.spellingbee.com. It used to be carried on ESPN. Like a real sporting event, but not since 2017.
Why do they call it a Bee, anyway? According to SpellingBee.com, etymology of the word bee is unclear. Until recently, people thought it was the same word as the insect. It had something to do with the similar industriousness of bees working together in a social gathering.
After further study, the word bee, used this way, is thought to come from a completely different word. A word in the dialect of Middle English, been or bean, means "voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary).
Seems to me the result is the same.
Bee and bee are not homophones. They're not spelled differently.. They’re not homographs either because they don't sound different..
Since homonyms refer to both homophones and homographs, that's what they are. I wonder if there are others?
One of my book clubs is reading The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri (Catapult, 2019). From the publisher: “…Nayeri defies stereotypes and raises surprising questions about the immigrant experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.”
Be curious! (and play with your words)
loaded with long and loopy letters.
from Ellsworth’s Extraordinary Electric Ears
and other Amazing Alphabetic Anecdotes
written and illustrated by Valorie Fisher
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2003
My dad was a good speller. He said he knew when his spelling was correct because it “looked right.” He claimed to be a good speller because he studied Latin in high school. I think he was just smart. He might have been able to win the National Spelling Bee. I think he never had the chance.
One hundred years ago today, nine spellers did participate in the first National Spelling Bee. That year, 1925, Frank Neuhauser (1913-2011) of Kentucky won the Bee by correctly spelling gladiolus. He was 11 years old when he won his $500 prize.
While millions of students qualified and participated, elimination rounds left a final pool of nine spellers, one for each participating sponsoring newspaper.
The contest has grown to include millions and millions of students from thousands of schools. This year, all fifty states are represented as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Department of Defense Schools in Europe. It is rare for spellers from outside the U.S. to compete. They respond to a special invitation or partnership. This year, students from the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Kuwait, and Nigeria will compete.
A Google search on “the best ways to study for a spelling test” showed guidelines, activities, and resources. I saw workbooks, worksheets of tricky words to memorize, word searches, homophones, vowel sounds, silent letters, alliteration (like Ellsworth Ears in today’s quote), and hundreds more.
After perusing several lists from Reading Rockets, YourDictionary, and TCKPublishing, I discovered no surprise. Success demands practice. That old adage, “practice makes perfect,” is about the most effective way to learn to spell.
Reading helps, too. I suspect that’s another reason why Dad’s words “looked right” to him. He saw them written correctly over and over.
Mneumonics are helpful. Jimminy Cricket sang E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A. I only get that spelling right when I sing it like I just did. At school we learned “A rat in the house might eat the ice cream” (Arithmetic) and “There’s a-rat in separate.” Accommodate is large enough for two sets of double letters.
According to Google’s own AI, the most often misspelled word in English is definitely. There is a finite way to spell definitely.
The word list to study for the Bee, arranged in several alphabetical lists from easiest to hardest, is right here. But word lists can get tedious.
Long words are fun. When we were young, we learned the word antidisestablishmentarianism. It’s a political position originated in 19th-century Britain opposing the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a made-up word popularized by Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in Disney’s Mary Poppins. But the word is older than that. Oxford English Dictionary claims Helen Herman recorded its first use in her March 10, 1931, column “A-muse-ings” in the Syracuse University Daily Orange. Ms. Herman says the word “implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, [and] wonderful.”
But the longest English word, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolanoconiosis, is the medical name for a disease caused by breathing in quartz dust.
The longest place name in the US, Lake Chaubunagungamaug, is sometimes called Webster Lake. That’s what I’d call it. The native name is derived from a Nipmuc language and translates to “fishing place at the boundaries, neutral meeting grounds.”
Lots of interesting words are short, too. Agog, gizmo, idiom, loofah, muumuu, quirky, ruckus, syzygy, uvula, wonky, zephyr come to mind.
Spelling can be tricky. Most languages include homophones, homographs, and homonyms. These, themselves, are tricky, too. Here’s how to keep them straight.
Homo- is a prefix that means same, alike, similar. So a homophone, like a telephone, are words that sound the same but are not spelled the same. My favorite homophones are in a tie: discussed/disgust and gorgeous/gorges. I don’t have a favorite homograph. They are words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently. Bow (and arrow) and bow (after a spectacular performance), for example.
Homonyms refer to homophones or homographs, or both.
Still with me?
I keep a list of interesting words on my desktop. It’s not easy to work most of them into a sentence, but that’s not what the list is for. Actually, I’m not sure it’s for anything. It just is. My list includes favorites like crepuscular and petrechor.
I guess I’m a little bit of a word nerd. I keep a list of opposites and a list of unusual phrases, too.
My favorite pair of opposites is dearth/plethora.
Here’s my post about unusual phrases from December 2023, "It's Idiomatic."
This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee will be its 97th. The Bee was canceled from 1943 to 1945 because of WWII and again in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The champion will be the 110th due to several two-way ties and an eight-way tie in 2019.
Find directions for tuning in (beginning today from 8 am to 4:40 pm EDT) at www.spellingbee.com. It used to be carried on ESPN. Like a real sporting event, but not since 2017.
Why do they call it a Bee, anyway? According to SpellingBee.com, etymology of the word bee is unclear. Until recently, people thought it was the same word as the insect. It had something to do with the similar industriousness of bees working together in a social gathering.
After further study, the word bee, used this way, is thought to come from a completely different word. A word in the dialect of Middle English, been or bean, means "voluntary help given by neighbors toward the accomplishment of a particular task" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary).
Seems to me the result is the same.
Bee and bee are not homophones. They're not spelled differently.. They’re not homographs either because they don't sound different..
Since homonyms refer to both homophones and homographs, that's what they are. I wonder if there are others?
One of my book clubs is reading The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri (Catapult, 2019). From the publisher: “…Nayeri defies stereotypes and raises surprising questions about the immigrant experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.”
Be curious! (and play with your words)
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