2016 Collin County Spelling Bee: One Champion, Many Winners!

Only two spellers left in the final rounds

Collin County Spelling Bee was held this week on the 3^rd. Nairit Sarkar, a 6^th grader from Rice Middle School won the spelling bee with the word tussive. Nairit will go on to our regional spelling bee on March 26. This is the second time he is on the quest for a seat on the stage of National Spelling Bee.  

The above is a short version of the event, and the event deserves more elaboration. In fact, February 3^rd was a significant day for our local spellers. This year, sixty two spellers competed for four hours for a chance to advance to the regional event. As the minutes went by, one after another, they stepped on to the center stage, facing the judges, braving some extremely difficult words, and earning high honors with either correct or incorrect spellings regardless, as true champion spellers do.

Neha spells a word on stage

In the later rounds, words went over the official word lists such as the Spell It!, the school words, the Paideia, and the CWL. These are the word lists some of our best spellers had spent months and years to prepare. Besides words from more demanding list CWL, such as tulle, velveteen, and acclivity, there were words that we often refer to as the “surprise words”, such as graptolite, diastema, klaxon (this one was used in 2007 in regional bee as a surprise word), and the winning word tussive. These words are not in the official study lists. They are the ones that came directly from the MW3rd. 

The appearances of “surprise words” can be very frustrating to spellers, especially to the ones who have less than two years’ experience in the bee. As spellers will need to spend so much time perfecting their official lists, which requires at least two years of dedicated study. Only with more time, spellers can venture outside the official lists, and start study pages of the MW3rd. When I talked to parents with aspiring spellers, I often had to stress one observation of mine: the surprise words are not too surprising after all. They tend to be medical or science words, and tend to have special spelling patterns or sounds. A careful speller can pick up many of these surprise words daily. By the way, the use of the word tussive turns out to be fairly common, as we could have heard our doctors talking about anti-tussive medicines for a cough that we seem to suffer often in the winter time. 

Our readers can find some of the harder words from Amy’s words and Rebecca's words on our website. Other study aids such as Hexco’s spelling products can be helpful as well. But the most important thing is to learn to collect words on your own, by following guide such as the spelling lessons Amy posted on this site in the past years. We also encourage spellers to attend spelling bee events each year. Basically, be more bee-like: collecting and accumulating interesting words tirelessly.

We will watch the upcoming Dallas Morning News Regional Bee on March 26, with best wishes to our champion speller Nairit and all the other champions from counties around Dallas.