They happen every spring: the thrilling final rounds of the Scripps Spelling Bee. Dozens of charmingly hyper-intense tweens meet for a high-stakes orthographic battle that resembles nothing so much as a weird nightmare an adult might have. You’re 14 and millions are watching as someone demands that you spell “abseil” or “psammophile” — and then your teeth start falling out.
And if you’re reading this in English, they’re a nice opportunity to pause and appreciate how specific this ritual is to our language.
It’s not as if spelling bees exist only in English. But there are plenty of languages in which it would be difficult or pointless to try to mount a serious spelling competition; they have such tight correspondence between sounds and letters that simply hearing a word gives you almost all the information needed to write it down. Finnish has this reputation, with its consistent rules and use of double letters to mark long vowels. Malay and Italian are considered quite regular. Korean and Turkish, too — thanks in part to political efforts like the introduction of Hangul writing and Kemal Ataturk’s aggressive language reforms. Croatian might look, to some, confusingly spangled with diacritical marks, but those help steer toward a logical, unambiguous system in which every sound matches a single character and every character makes a single sound.
In English that is pretty comically not the case. “The same sound can be spelled multiple ways, and similar spelling can produce completely different pronunciations,” says Esteban Touma from the language-learning site Babbel, which recently put together an analysis of the Scripps bee’s official study guides. OUGH can make at least eight different noises; our most common sound, the schwa, can be written using any vowel at all, including Y (dactyl). The hilariously overcomplicated “rules” we offer children (“I before E except after C”) are so exception-riddled as to be useless (“The neighbors’ weird height and weight let us seize their protein at our leisure”). Touma, a native speaker of Spanish, remembers the frustrations of learning this stuff: “For the longest time,” he says, “I couldn’t understand the connection between the word ‘recipe’ and how it’s spelled.”
Winning a bee involves understanding some of the reasons for this. Printing arrived just as the language was undergoing profound changes on the road from Middle English to Modern English; we locked in how we spelled things before settling on how we would pronounce them. (It didn’t help that one of the first presses to reach England came with Flemish typesetters who felt there should obviously be an H in “ghost.”) Latin-happy educated speakers added letters like the B’s in “debt” and “doubt,” to better reflect debitum and dubitare. Then there’s the hybrid nature of the language, shaped by waves of people washing into the British Isles: Celtic speakers, Angles and Saxons who brought our common Germanic words, Viking types speaking Old Norse, Norman conquerors who kicked off centuries of conducting elite affairs in French and adding piles of Latin-derived vocabulary. Then there are all the words tracing back through Arabic (sugar), Hindi (jungle, shampoo), Chinese (ketchup), Yiddish (glitch) and more. All of which we write using, roughly, an alphabet built for Latin, without much use of diacritical marks to explain ourselves, even abandoning helpful old characters like the thorn, which used to make a TH sound before we switched to TH. (Which, who knows, can also be pronounced as in “Thomas” or “clothes.”)
This is precisely what makes an English spelling bee exciting. It is, in fact, part of why spelling bees exist in the first place. There have been proposals, over the centuries, to comprehensively “fix” our spelling — the Shavian alphabet is a fascinating example — but English is too widely spoken to even dream of the tyrannical power it would require to make everyone use it differently. We try to keep our system standardized, in part, by devoting a significant chunk of childhood education to teaching our young all the irregularities they’ll need to navigate in order to read and write fluently. This is the goal that, long ago, somebody thought to gamify by having children compete over spelling.
A bee is not simply a game of memorizing those irregularities. It asks you to understand the guts and the history of the language itself. Contestants learn etymological roots and spelling patterns until, faced with a word they’ve never heard, they can ask what language it derives from, knowing that an ancient Greek F sound may call for a PH or that a closing French O may need an EAU. Babbel’s analysis of the bee’s recent study guides suggests some of the new patterns they’ll need to recognize; they say they’ve seen a steep rise in internet-based terms (webisode, demonetize) and plenty of newly adopted words with non-European origins (samsara, pho). Memorize all the Latin roots you want, and you may still get tripped up by where the H goes in banh mi.
Given his work, Touma says, he has dabbled in learning a few additional languages — though none of the ones with a popular reputation for being tough to spell, like French, Irish and Tibetan languages. He dipped into Indonesian, often cited as highly regular and phonetic. German spelling, too, felt more predictable than English. A bee in his native Spanish, he says, would be relatively dull, apart from a few mix-ups between B’s and V’s.
English — with its hybrid history, its “sun never sets” empire, its American melting pot — just happens to be particularly good at turning spelling into sport. It’s a constant frustration for those learning the language. But at least once a year, it offers delightful puzzles to those competing to have learned it best.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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