This past week the Scripps National Spelling Bee featured 275 spellers from age 8 to 15, spelling words most of us cannot even begin to imagine.
The winner was Sukanya Roy of Scranton, PA who correctly spelled cymotrichous.
The final nine words in the competition are listed below, with their meanings and correct spellings. (Even the spell-checker on my blogging software didn’t know most of these words.):
- cymotrichous: adj. Having wavy hair.
- periscii: Those who live within a polar circle, whose shadows, during some summer days, will move entirely round, falling toward every point of the compass.
- sorites:
- A logical argument in which multiple arguments (syllogisms) are arranged so that the intermediate conclusions are omitted, being implicitly understood, and only the final conclusion is stated.
- This is typically structured so that the predicate of each argument forms the subject of the next until the subject of the first is joined with the predicate of the last. More on sorites here.
- hooroosh: An uproar or great fuss.
- orgeat: a liquor or syrup extracted from barley and sweet almonds, used as a flavoring for beverages and foods, or sometimes medicinally for its mild soothing properties.
- naumkeag: A circular, pleated, abrasive sanding pad used in scouring operations in the shoe and other industries. The Naumkeag were a Native American tribe that lived in present day Massachusetts.
- galoubet: A French word for a type of flute. The flute is wooden, about a foot long , played by the left hand only, and always accompanied the tambourine.
- Jugendstil: artistic style that arose in Germany about the mid-1890s and continued through the first decade of the 20th century, deriving its name from the Munich magazine Die Jugend (“Youth”), which featured Art Nouveau designs.
- panguingue: A card game played only in the western United States, where it is popular as a gambling game in many clubs. It developed from conquian, the ancestor of rummy games.