The word list for the Scripps National Spelling Bee is crafted by a panel of 21 people, including five former Scripps champions
Crew members assemble the main stage ahead of the 2023 Scripps Nations Spelling Bee on Sunday, May 28, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. OXON HILL, Md. — — As the final pre-competition meeting of the Scripps National Spelling Bee's word selection panel stretches into its seventh hour, the pronouncers no longer seem to care.
For decades, the word panel's work has been a closely guarded secret. This year, Scripps — a Cincinnati-based media company — granted The Associated Press exclusive access to the panelists and their pre-bee meeting, with the stipulation that The AP would not reveal words unless they were cut from the list.The 21 panelists sit around a makeshift, rectangular conference table in a windowless room tucked inside the convention center outside Washington where the bee is staged every year.
The panel's work has changed over the decades. From 1961 to 1984, according to James Maguire's book “American Bee,” creating the list was a one-man operation overseen by Jim Wagner, a Scripps Howard editorial promotions director, and then by Harvey Elentuck, a then-MIT student who approached Wagner about helping with the list in the mid-1970s.
Trinkle, who joined the panel in 1997, used to produce the majority of her submissions by reading periodicals like The New Yorker or The Economist. “The dictionary is on the computer and is highly searchable in all kinds of ways — which the spellers know as well. If they want to find all the words that entered the language in the 1650s, they can do that, which is sometimes what I do,” Trinkle says. “The best words kind of happen to you as you're scrolling around through the dictionary.”
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