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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

There Are 472,000 Words in the Dictionary, but 120,000 were Enough to Win [nytimes.com]

Seemingly unfazed by the stage lights and television cameras, one gifted adolescent after the next approached the microphone on Thursday night and without a hint of timidity correctly spelled daunting words like “erysipelas” and “aiguillette.”

In the end, after 20 rounds had distilled a group of 562 competitive spellers to just eight, those who were left remained in a merciless logjam. Shortly after midnight, after the 2019 Scripps National Spelling Bee announced that it was running out of challenging words, each was crowned the winner [nytimes.com] in an eight-way tie.

It turned out the winners had more in common than an aptitude for spelling: Six of them had relied on SpellPundit, a coaching company started last year by two former competitive spellers, the teenage siblings Shobha and Shourav Dasari of Spring, Tex., a Houston suburb.

[...]One of the “octochamps,” Sohum Sukhatankar, 13, of Dallas said he had spent about 30 hours a week studying the 120,000 words SpellPundit had culled from the 472,000 words in the dictionary.

For an annual subscription of $600, SpellPundit offers the massive list, which is sorted by difficulty levels and guarantees that it includes all words used in the competitions. Business took off after last year’s champion, Karthik Nemmani gave a shout-out to the service.

Of this year’s top 50 spellers, 38 were customers, according to Ms. Dasari, 18. One selling point, the siblings say, is that their comprehensive database of words and modules saves time. The Dasaris estimate that their service, which allows users to type the words instead of spelling them aloud, makes preparation four times faster.

But yesterday, some wondered whether the service had taken some of the innocence out of the contest.

Fun fact: Correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe there would be no reason to have a spelling bee in German. There is a 1:1 correspondence between how a word sounds and how it is spelled.

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