Spelling Bee - can you beat the 1875 champ?

The first question was one of pronunciation. Andrea Glazier, Spellmaster for the opening heat of the first Times national Spelling Bee, was baffled.

“How do you say, ‘Huish Episcopi’?” she asked, as she called to the stage a team from the Somerset school of that name. The answer is that it is pronounced exactly as it is spelt. If only the rest of the English language were so simple.

Nine teams competed in the first of three regional heats in Exeter yesterday. The winners will go on to the semi-finals in May and, if successful, to the Grand Final in London in June.

Even in its infancy The Times Spelling Bee has captured the imagination of Britain’s secondary school children. More than 1,300 schools and colleges expressed an interest in competing and teams from 754 of them will put their spelling to the test in 89 local heats over the next couple of months.The opening rounds in Exeter gave a flavour of what contestants can expect. The nine teams competing were each made up of three Year 7 pupils plus a reserve in case of injury, amnesia or stagefright. In the first round pupils took it in turns to spell words.

The only pitfalls were mishearing words — “costume” for “customer” — and slips of the tongue, such as “S-T-I-C-T-H” for “stitch”. By the second round the words had got a little harder. There were some valiant attempts — “F-L-E-A-C-E” for “fleece” — and some frankly desperate — “F-I-G-I-T” for “thicket”. By the end holes had begun to appear in the ranks as the first contestants were eliminated. In round three, contestants leapt deftly through multi-syllable words such as “penniless”, “metropolis”, “conspiracy” and “holocaust”.

One pupil, Natasha, from Swanmead School in Ilminster, Somerset, however, had an altercation with “turbot”. It is clearly a word that sounds different when you have a Somerset accent. “T-E-R-B-E-R-T”, the pupils suggested. As the words got steadily harder, the guesses became wilder. After “tright” (trite), “constilation” (constellation), “helendance” (hallucination), “surritil” (sartorial), “extecity” (ecstasy) and “diswaid” (dissuade), only Megan Bessell, from Swanmead, and Robert McFadden, from Torbay Boys’ Grammar, were left standing.

Robert successfully spelt “metamorphosis” — a word that many Year 7 pupils will never have heard of. Megan hit back with “yachting” before both came unstuck with “rhetoric” and “minuscule”. It was neck and neck for two more questions before Megan stumbled with “currator” and Robert correctly spelled “blasphemy”. After that nail-biting finish to the team knockout the teams were back for a quick-fire round, spelling as many words correctly as they could in two minutes. At the outset they had to choose between easy words, scoring one point each, medium words scoring two or hard words scoring three. Megan Bessell took her team to a place in the semi-final with a spectacular volley of correctly spelt words, barely pausing for breath. Afterwards she confessed that her favourite subject at school was PE, but she added: “I do like English too. I have been a good speller since I was tiny, I could even spell words like ‘beautiful’ when I was 5.”

I will let future contestants into a secret. Two, in fact. A trial run last week found that contestants who chose easy words in the quick-fire round far outscored those choosing hard or medium words, simply because they are shorter, and everyone can spell them without having to stop to think. The second secret is that no one chooses the easy words in case it looks as though they don’t know how to spell.

All the tens of thousands of words in The Times Spelling Bee come from the Collins English Dictionary. To resolve any disputes and to make sure that there were no slip-ups its head of content, Cormac McKeown, adjudicated the opening rounds.

“I found it surprisingly stressful,” he admitted, “It was hard work having to write down and check all those spellings in such a short time.”

Despite the hard work behind the scenes the intention is to make spelling exciting. Natasha Warren, helping to organise the first of what will become an annual event for The Times, said: “If you are going to help people get better at spelling you’ve got to make it fun. This is a team event so we are not putting them under pressure in the spotlight on their own. We have been stunned by the response. We have had entries from schools from the Shetlands to Guernsey.”

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