Tomorrow are the semi-final and final rounds of the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Talented orthographers aged 8 to 14 will be tasked with spelling difficult words such as last year’s winner, guetapens, or the winner from 2012, cymotrichous.

However, many of us still have difficulty spelling even the simplest of words. We asked our followers on Twitter and fellow Reverbers what kinds of words still trip them up.

Double consonants were a common culprit. Words such as accommodate, disappointed, embarrassed, occurrence, unnecessary, immediately, and of course misspell, sent many folks to Google and dictionaries (such as [cough] Wordnik [cough]). Mischievous received a couple of votes with that pesky alternate pronunciation that adds an extra i in the penultimate syllable.

French-derived words, often with silent vowels, were the bane of many an existence, including bourgeois and bourgeoisie, bureau, bureaucracy, and bureaucrat, guarantee, nausea and nauseous, restaurant and restaurateur. “‘Restaurant’ I’m fine with,” said Drew Mackie, “but ‘restaurateur’ I bungle. Dumb, vanishing ‘n.'” We agree.

For others, silent consonants were the tricksters in words like Buddhist, lasagna, rhythm, silhouette, and surprise. “Is there an r or isn’t there?!!!!!!!” asked @miarose. There is, as Jim Nabors knows.

Sometimes it’s our fingers that do the misspellings. One Reverb developer noted that he often spells password as passwd “because of too much time with Apache,” while another used to constantly misspell myself as mysql. One New England native confessed that he often writes main as maine, while another Reverber’s fingers type reasearch when she very well knows it’s research.

Other words are simply too much alike. Who hasn’t spelled weather as wheather (“a bad spell of weather,” as a Reverber put it), or whether as wether? As David Habib noted, “‘Wether‘ is a word and always passes spellcheck.”

For still others, the variant is more well-known. Several of us were astounded to learn that the correct spelling of supercede is actually supersede, and one Reverber relayed how he lost a spelling bee by spelling doughnut as donut, which we all agreed was wholly unfair.

And damn all those alike-sounding vowels! Is it anomalous or anamolous, anomaly or anamoly, anonymity or anonimity? How about definitely or definately, privilege or privelege,  separate or seperate? (The first word is right for all those by the way.)

We’ve just about given up on learning how to spell these words correctly, and will leave the art of orthography to the experts.

Speaking of which, be sure to join us on Twitter on Thursday as we live-tweet the semi-final and final rounds of the Scripps Bee.

Happy (mis)spelling!

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Elliott Brown]

Earlier this week, 278 spellers from around the world gathered together to compete in the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee. Yesterday 14-year old Snigdha Nandipati of San Diego, California won with guetapens, which means “an ambush; an attack.”

We here at Wordnik had great fun yesterday live-tweeting the seminfinal and championship rounds. In between biting our nails for the young spellers, we tweeted defintions, etymologies, example sentences, and other fun facts about these difficult words. First up, the semifinal round:

Next, the final round:

Curious about all the words from the final round? We’ve put them in a handy list and have updated the list of all the winning words.

Congratulations once again to Snigdha and all the spellers!

Have you heard the buzz? It’s Bee Week, which means elite spellers from around the world are coming together to practice some orthography and compete for the 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee championship.

To celebrate, we’ll be live-tweeting the semifinal and championship rounds on Thursday, May 31, from 10 AM to 1 PM and 8 PM to 10 PM EDT, respectively. Join us as we cheer on the competitors and provide etymologies, lists, images, and other fun facts about the words the spellers spell. Follow us on Twitter and look out for the official Scripps Bee hashtag, #spellingbee.

Can’t wait till Thursday? Play Spelling Bee Bingo by guessing what you think will be this year’s winning word. You can enter as many times as you want. The winner gets a Wordnik T-shirt and other swag.

The first national spelling bee was held in 1925 “as a consolidation of numerous local spelling bees,” and was won by 11-year old Frank Neuhauser, who passed away in March 2011 at 97. Neuhauser spelled gladiolus correctly to beat out eight other finalists and win “$500 in gold, a bicycle and a trip to the White House to meet President Calvin Coolidge.”

But the art of correct spelling, or orthography, wasn’t always so valued. Spelling in Old English texts was so variable that now they “are generally ‘normalized’,” says Rice University, “or printed in accordance with what scholars think is a good representative form for each word.” It wasn’t until the 15th century and the advent of the printer that the word orthography even came about. Since then English spelling has seen many changes, such as Latinizing (det becoming debt due to the Latin debitum); attempts at spelling reform; problems with reform; spellcheck; when spellcheck won’t help; autocorrect and the Cupertino effect.

This week’s competitors won’t have – or need – spellcheck or autocorrect. In fact they probably know most of these sometimes-obscure correctly spelled words that look like misspellings of other words; all the winning words from 1925’s gladiolus to 2011’s cymotrichous, “characterized by having waving hair”; and these guesses from last year’s Spelling Bee Bingo. They’ll have no need for the Oatmeal’s hilarious explanation of 10 words we must stop misspelling, and would laugh as hard as we did at this roundup of ridiculous, and frighteningly common, spelling mistakes on Twitter.

We look forward to seeing some amazing “spells” cast this Thursday. Remember to join us on Twitter as we live-tweet the semifinal and championship rounds.

Best of luck to all the spellers!

Late last week in the word world, it was about everything Bee – the Scripps National Spelling Bee, that is.  Every year 275 spellers enter, and one speller leaves – this year that speller was 14-year old Sukanya Roy of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, winning with cymotrichous, which means “characterized by having wavy hair.”

We here at Wordnik celebrated the Bee in a couple of ways.  We hosted a Spelling Bee Bingo, in which we invited you to guess as to what the winning word might be for a chance to win a Wordnik T-shirt and other schwag.  While no one guessed the wavy-haired word, someone did pose three guesses that ended up in the final round – andouille, grison, and polatouche – and for us that’s close enough.

Congratulations to Amy Goldstein!  Not only is Amy a repeat Secret Word Wednesday winner, she made it to the final round of the Bee in 1998 before missing on the word aitch, which, understandably, is her least favorite word.

In addition to bingo, we live-tweeted the last day of competition. Rather than try to summarize, we’ll let our Tweets speak for themselves!

Finally, the Bee looked like so much fun, we can’t wait till next year. So we’ll be hosting our own spelling bee in the near future, and would love any suggestions from those of you in the Bay Area for bars that might be interested in hosting such an event. Drinks, prizes, and give-aways will be available!

Till then, study up!

Sameer Mishra, an eight-grader from West Lafayette, Indiana, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last Friday with Guerdon, which means “a reward or payment.” Sameer, we salute you.