Spelling bees may have jumped rhe shark

Maybe you always thought that spelling bees were kind of geeky and ridiculous. I actually used to think they were pretty cool, but in recent years they may have got out of hand and jumped the shark.

The 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee - the big one - was won by the correct spelling of the word "éclaircissement". The previous word, which almost caught the contestant out, was "commelina". So, kudos to 13-year old Faizan Zaki for getting these right. But these are not English words.

"Éclaircissement" is obviously French, and with a bit of basic French you can figure out what it means. "Commelina" is the Latin name for a flower, but most English-speaking people would just say "dayflower" should they ever need to reference it.

Now, I understand about loanwords, and how they have immeasurably enriched and broadened - made unweildy, you might say - the English language. But I would argue that these are not loanwords at all. These are foreign words, not in general usage. Sure, they may appear in one or two of the more comprehensive dictionaries, but they are not words that even the most erudite speakers would use in an actual conversation.

Their spellings are being asked in the Scripps Spelling Bee because modern contestants - principally Indian-Americans, as far as I can tell, obsessively coached by over-achieving fathers and dragon mothers - are so good, having spent years of their childhoods poring over dictionaries, that regular English words are just too easy.

So, what is a self-respecting national spelling competition to do? If they were to stick to regular English words, the competition would go on forever (or until one contestants fell asleep from exhaustion). There is, then, no real alternative to including all manner of foreign and technical words.

In the process, though, it has become a test of rote memorization of dictionaries, and it loses any human element an amateur spelling bee might once have had. And I hate to think what kinds of lives these young kids live en route to their brief stardom in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.