V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

Did anyone catch the Scripps National Spelling Bee last night?  In what I believe marks the first time my television has ever been tuned to ESPN, I watched 14-year-old Sukanya Roy spell her way into American orthographic history. No surprise that the competition’s words were doozies: zwischenspiel! capercaillie! opodeldoc! Sukanya and her compatriots had all the techniques down pat: asking for the word’s definition, its alternate pronunciations, and its language of origin, all to use as context clues to deduce their way through the words. Sukanya even had the interesting habit of tracing the letters onto one of her hands as she spelled. But how can a person who still has trouble spelling 50-cent words work up to heavyweight level? Workman Publishing humbly offers our very own How to Spell Like a Champ, a bee primer from several Scripps bigwigs and past national winners.  It certainly beats reading the dictionary. Sukanya’s winning word, by the way, was cymotrichous, which means “having wavy hair”: a shout out to all the curly girls out there who love to spell.