AP
The 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee kicked off on Wednesday with nearly 300 of young spellers from around the country gunning for a $ 40,000 top prize.
The field of 291 children will be whittled down to one champion at Thursday’s final in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
Since the inaugural competition in 1925, the words featured in the bee have become increasingly more difficult and obscure, requiring participants to have a commanding knowledge of root words, etymology, and world languages.
Scripps’s list of “winning words” from previous competitions gives a glimpse at this evolution. Relatively simple words such as “knack,” “therapy,” and “initials” dominated earlier installments of the spelling bee, while modern-day champions have had to tackle humdingers like “feuilleton,” “nunatak,” and “gesellschaft.”
The shift in difficulty can be partly attributed to ESPN’s coverage of the bee, which has attracted more students to the competition, Scripps spokeswoman Valerie Miller said. This is the 24th year ESPN will air the spelling bee.
But the biggest reason is simply that the spellers have gotten better.
“Words are more difficult now because the skills of the students also have expanded,” Miller told Business Insider. “These are the best of the best spellers, and the words they get in the national finals should be the greatest challenge.”
Here are some of the championship-clinching words from previous spelling bees:
1925 — gladiolus
AP
The championship word from the inaugural National Spelling Bee in 1925 was “gladiolus,” a flowering plant in the iris family.
Eleven-year-old Frank Neuhauser of Kentucky correctly spelled it to take home the top prize — $ 500 in gold pieces and a trip to the White House.
When he returned to Louisville, crowds greeted him with a ticker-tape parade and bouquets of aptly chosen gladiolus flowers, according to The Washington Post’s obituary of Neuhauser, who died in 2011.
The New York Times called Neuhauser’s winning word “a cakewalk by modern standards” that “harks back to simpler times.”
In the above photo, sixth-place finisher Patrick Kelly poses with President Calvin Coolidge.
1936 — eczema
Illinois Daily Newspaper Collections
Jean Trowbridge of Iowa correctly spelled “eczema” — a skin condition — to clinch the 1936 spelling bee. She also had to correctly spell “predilection,” which another finalist had missed.
Three decades later, “eczema” would resurface as the winning word at the 1965 bee.
1960 — eudaemonic
AP
Henry Feldman of Tennessee correctly spelled “eudaemonic” to win the 1960 spelling bee. “Eudaemonic” means “producing happiness.”
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