Broken bee? Spelling experts say tougher words are out there

The Scripps National Spelling Bee suffered a body blow when eight kids ended up co-champions because they were simply too accomplished to stumble over any of the words Scripps threw at them.

That doesn't mean it's irretrievably broken.

Even some critics who thought the words Thursday night were insultingly easy are optimistic that the bee can recover and produce a single champion next year and for many years to come.

"As spellers evolve, the bee does, too," 17-year-old former speller Grace Walters said Friday. She's the personal coach to last year's winner and three of this year's champions.

"The National Spelling Bee as we know it right now might be broken, but the bee is going to evolve. I think it can continue. ... I'll be really sad if it doesn't!" The extraordinary 2019 bee featured strong contestants, a field as deep and well-prepared as any in the event's 94-year history.

Of the 16 spellers in last year's prime-time finals, 10 made it back into this year's top 50. Seven made the top 16 for the second straight year, including two who advanced to ESPN's prime-time telecast three years in a row. (Both of those three-timers, Erin Howard and Shruthika Padhy, were among the eight champions.)
"We used to see these kinds of kids before, one at a time, two at a time. Tossing them in a group like that is just hard to digest for me."
"They were structurally prepared for kind of a duel between two spellers. What they recognised was they didn't have enough words of that very high level, of the most difficult level. ... They were all difficult words, but not the most difficult words. They had already gone through them."
"You could go to geographical words, names of tribes of people," the 15-year-old Siyona said. "Genus names, some slangy words are also a bit more difficult, not in the sense that they're hard to spell but they're a lot more unpredictable. They don't follow language patterns."
"It might mean resorting to words," Grace said, "that aren't as interesting to a national television audience."