Spelling bee pronouncer learned the meaning of K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E

A former Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, Bailly still loves words and helping spellers figure them out.

Feeling especially temerarious today? Think you’re a linguistic thaumaturge? Don’t know what those big words mean but still think you’re super smart at stuff?

Well, then try to spell along at home with contestants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Just see if you can keep up with the elementary and middle schoolers flexing their brain power. But first take a few pieces of advice from Dr. Jacques Bailly, who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee as an eighth grader in 1980 and has served as the event’s official pronouncer since 2003.

“I would tell people if you’re wondering how to spell a word, just spell it like it sounds,” Bailly told SB Nation the night before the 2018 semifinals and finals.

Bailly, who serves up the multisyllabic puzzles that precocious youngsters set about solving with humbling ease on ESPN each year, then revealed the process he would use to spell a word that he had never heard before.

“Well, I find out the language of origin. Because if it is German and it follows German rules, it’s going to be easy because I know how to spell in German. If it’s French and it follows French rules, it’s going to be a little tricky because there there’s some silent letters. But, basically, I know how to spell French words. The same goes for Hawaiian words and Spanish words and Italian words. Now, if it’s from Arabic, that’s a little trickier. Or if it’s from Chinese, that’s trickier too because they don’t use the Roman alphabet. So, first I find the language of origin, then I listen carefully to the meaning and see if there are any clues there.”

A professor of classics at the University of Vermont, Bailly has been thinking about words and learning how to better understand their components virtually all his life. And he has good news for aspiring spellers of any age without his training: The simplest approach is usually the best one.

”And then, if all else fails, I would give it a simple spelling that makes sense in terms of the sound of the words and the letters,” he says. “You know 90 percent of words are kind of spelled the way they sound.”

He also believes in the power of spelling to inspire curiosity and nurture future learning.

”Sure, you do memorize words. It helps to memorize a word. That’s the best way to spell it. But I think more than that you open doors because maybe you didn’t know there was even such a thing as I don’t know an aquaterrarium before you learned that word,” he said. “And you didn’t know there were such a thing as a vivarium. Or you didn’t know any number of the words. Then you might get curious about that. And even if you don’t, later on in life when you take a chemistry class you’ll be getting to words in chemistry that kind of makes sense to you because you can take them apart and put them together. So you have kind of a little bit of a leg up and you’ve been exposed to all these different areas of human endeavor. I always think of it as a gateway skill. You know nobody will get a Nobel Prize in it, but maybe it will open a door that someday somebody will go on to be a great writer or great chemist or something.”

Bailly took a few minutes from reviewing his script for the final day of the 2018 event to talk with SB Nation about his start in spelling, the way that comedy writers help punch up the bee, and what impresses him most about the young people who compete.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

What is your preparation process for the spelling bee? How long in advance do you start it? What is your part to play in preparing the words and the script?

It’s a fairly complex thing. We have about 10 people who contribute to making the list; and there is a permanent staff at headquarters in Cincinnati. They work year-round on the words, and we’ll pretty much start next year’s national list as soon as we’re done with this national list. We’ll meet in the Fall to talk about a potential list of words, to try to get it set.

We’ll do some online homework about that and figure out the pronunciations and the languages of origin, whether these words will work. Then we massage it into a list that has some idea of difficulty levels. We don’t want to re-use words that are similar to each other. So there’s a lot of parameters, and then, honestly, there’s just a lot of copy editing.

In the past 20 years we’ve only had one problem with a word that’s been misspelled on our lists. But we certainly want to make sure that we don’t have any more of those, as you can imagine.

Do you recall what that word was?

No, I don’t.

I do remember just [Wednesday] we reinstated a speller because she spelled balaclava, and it turned out there was a variant entry that had a variant spelling. She spelled it before I offered the definition so we had to reinstate her.

Sometimes it’s our mistake. Sometimes it’s just a situation where we discover oh my gosh there’s a variant and she really did spell the word. And that’s fine. We’ve had that happen a couple of times.

How do you feel connected to or responsible to the spellers when you’re out there and this is all happening?

I feel a really strong connection because I’ve been where they are. I won the Bee 37 years ago, but it’s still kind of present in my personality. Although I have gotten to the point where my mature view is that basically they won everything they can win before they show up at the Bee; and that the Bee is just a celebration of what they’re doing. But they care so very much about placing as well as the can that I really want not to let them down and to make sure I do everything possible to give them all the information that might help them.

You know I’m only one of about 10 people up there in front of the stage. I’m the most visible one, but there’s a panel of judges and then there are other officials up there and we are all ready to jump in at any second if we see anything that we think might be helpful or might be amiss.

You mentioned the feeling of responsibility to give the spellers everything that you can to help them. What are the things that you focus on for that in terms of your background knowledge? What are the tools that you try to give each speller with each word?

There are clues for how to spell a word. If the speller has the word memorized they’re probably going to spell it right. If they don’t it’ll be because of a misspeaking. But if they don’t have it memorized and they’re trying to kind of figure it out there are clues in the the language of origin. If it’s from Greek, for instance, the F sound might be a PH or the I sounds might be a Y. If it’s from German, the SH sound like an shush might be an SCH. There are all kinds of systems in English; so the the language of origin gives a big clue as to which system this word might fit into. And then the meaning often give gives a clue. We had the word “celtuce” today which is a cross between celery and lettuce. And, of course, the definition mentioned celery and lettuce. It’s spelled C-E-L-T-U-C-E.

So there’s a big clue in that definition. I want to make sure I give that definition. And, in fact, I even kind of emphasize the words celery and lettuce, trying to not explicitly give a clue but make sure they notice those words. Then there are clues like if it’s a plural word; sometimes plurals have an S on them but some don’t. And then there are ways to make a word plural in Latin or in Greek that might be a clue. There are just all kinds of little clues.

And then there’s the pronunciation, which is a fairly complex thing. I have symbols in front of me that tell me how to pronounce the word. But I have to choose which pronunciation to put first because that’s going to be the dominant impression. I try and choose the one that seems most phonetic. But then there are some alternatives that might have other clues; so I need to try and work those in. There are also some alternatives that might be misleading. S

Just take the word “mischievous.” Mis-chuh-vuh s give you the Mis. But mis-chee-vee-uh s might give you that middle syllable. And there’s another pronunciation: Mis-chee-vee-əs, which is kind of misleading about the spelling. But it’s a standard pronunciation, so it’s listed in the dictionary. So I kind of have to negotiate those waters. I kind of want to just err in favor of the speller so that they never feel misled. I want to treat them the way I would like to be treated when I was a speller.

The requests to use the words in sentences tend to get you attention, but also must make a big difference for the spellers as well.

I think it does. But it doesn’t really help with the spelling, as far as I can tell. What it does is it gives people some small reassurance that these are real English words.

And then we have some sentences that are honestly just there to be funny that are called comedy sentences. We have actual comedy writers who contribute a lot of them; and that’s for comic relief because it is such a tense situation. We did have one speller who just let it be known that she didn’t care for the comedy sentences, and so we never read them when she was up there. And that’s easy enough.

One thing that is important to comedy is timing, and you seem to have a pretty good knack for delivering those. Do you practice those sentences?. Do you know in advance which type of sentence you’re getting or are you sort of just intuiting it on the fly? How does that work?

A lot of them I’ve read before. Some of them, I read just this past Sunday so I didn’t get much chance to look at them. And then there are actually people who are feeding sentences in live as the competition goes along. Those get vetted by people.

As you might imagine [with] comedy writers, they aren’t all writing jokes that are fit for a teen crowd. We aren’t going to go into politics or religion or certain subjects. So we take away a lot of their stock in trade. But those come live and I sort of have to vet them as I go and decide how to read them.

Do you recall any comedy sentences that you enjoyed particularly? That got a chuckle out of you?

Oh, there was one I think it was about “mucilaginous.”

There was some art teacher who had to go online to figure out how to get mucilaginous substances out of her hair after the craft project.

That was a pretty funny one.

As someone who doesn’t know what that word means what could help me help me understand that joke?

Well, mucilaginous it kinda means gluey. So you might use a mucilaginous substance for a craft project, and if you get that in your hair it might be hard to get out.

There was one that I threw my kids’ names into that was really fun. It was another one about stuff in your hair. The word was “gnocchi,” that Italian potato pasta, and the sentence was something like JP and Isidora were picking gnocchi out of their hair for weeks after the great gnocchi food fight of 2015.

That got a lot of chuckles back home. Of course, nobody knows it’s JP and Isidora. I don’t do to shoutouts on ESPN except to people that nobody’s going to possibly know I’m doing shoutouts too.

How do you navigate the stress levels of the competitors as you’re going through this?

Well, it is more tough for them. But, generally, I find when they come up to the microphone and they’re nervous, the best thing to do is to give them their word quickly because they’re there to spell that word. Once they have that word they become focused very, very quickly and very well because they’re used to that. It gives them a task to do.

So when I get a nervous speller what I try to do is say you know, ‘Hello, here’s your word.’ And some of them you know want to get up there and say, ‘Namaste, Dr. Bailey,’ or you know ‘Ni hao, Dr. Bailey,’ and I’ll try and respond if I know the language.

You’ve mentioned all of these languages of origin. What sort of education and consistent study did you have to get and do you continue to do to be able to do this work?

I teach classics at the University of Vermont, which means I teach Greek and Latin. English is not just one language. It’s a base of English, but then you have to add on top of it old Norse, from when the Danes ruled England. And then French from when William the Conqueror ruled England. And then all these English schoolboys were learning Greek and Latin, and they were pouring Greek and Latin into English.

So, I basically know German, French, Latin, and Greek pretty well. That covers most of the bases for the difficult spellings in English.

Given your role, how much practice do you have to put in for the pronunciations? To be comfortable with that feels like a whole other task.

I’ve been preparing for that my whole life. In first grade, I learned using the phonetic method. I was looking at phonetic symbols in first grade to learn to sound out words. And that was switched over for just the regular alphabet. So I feel like all my life I’ve sort of been aware that there’s a difference between the sounds of the spoken language and the way a word is spelled.

So what I’m doing at the spelling bee is I’m looking at a system of symbols that tells you how to say the word. I’m not actually looking at the word. And that system of symbols is pretty consistent. There’s about 50 sounds in English that make meaning, and there are about 50 symbols. And so I know how to read that kind of like an alphabet and it’s kind of second nature to me now. But also my sidekick Dr. Sietsema, who pronounced some [Wednesday], he used to write for the dictionary as the pronunciation editor. So he kind of wrote that part of the dictionary. So I’ve got I’ve got a pretty deep bench of help there.

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Let’s rewind all the way back to grade school when you were studying the phonetic alphabet and sounds. What made you interested in that at such a young age?

I think when you first learn to read everything is a little strange because there are a lot of words that make no sense. You think of were. Or should or would or could. They’re all sort of sight words.

So there are a lot of mismatches between spelling and the sound. You get over that, unless you don’t. I never really got over it. It always seemed kind of cool and interesting to me.

And so I learned to read by this phonetic method using sound symbols. And then in fifth grade my teacher pointed out that lot of these harder words have Greek or Latin elements and you can kind of take them apart like Legos. So a word like “otolaryngology” — a $5 word — has oto meaning ear, ryn like rhinoceros meaning nose, and laryn like larynx meaning throat. And that’s you’re ear, nose and throat medicine.

So a lot of these so-called harder words in English or kinda like Legos. If you know the pieces, you can figure out what they mean, and take them apart and put them back together. And that’s what those spellers are doing.

How did you first get into the spelling bee as a competitor?

Well, I was pretty much ripe for it thanks to my fifth grade teacher with the etymology. Then in sixth grade my teacher asked if I wanted to be on the spelling team. I guess I must have done well on a spelling test. I didn’t know what it was, and I said sure. And it sort of snowballed from there. For a couple of years, I was on the spelling team but I didn’t win a spelling bee. Then the third year, I won all the way up until I won national.

I would imagine that bee at the national level is was quite different now. What was it like for you to experience at that age?

The spelling bee is an interesting thing. It is the nation’s premier middle school academic competition. But it’s also a huge media event. You know the winner gets mobbed by the media. It’s really kind of a mixed event. It’s kind of interesting. I mean, the media isn’t going to mob the winner of MATHCOUNTS.

Also, it was much smaller then. There were only 112 competitors. This year, we had 550. And the prize was a $1,000 back then, and this year it’s $40,000.

I don’t know. I don’t think that’s just inflation.

I think it’s just a much more serious event that has reached a lot more of the population, and so we get a much higher level of competitiveness.

Do you recall the word you spelled correctly to win as a competitor?

There are words you will never forget. Those words are the words that you win a spelling bee with and the words that you go out on.

The word was “elucubrate,” and it means to study at night, to burn the midnight oil.

It’s a good word. I mean you can actually use it in your life.

In terms of that prize money when you won: Was there something special you did with it? Did it go to tuition? Did you treat yourself? Was there a set of encyclopedias?

When I won it, I got my third set of Encyclopedia Britannica, and back then these were heavy books. The set that I got was bound in some very thick leather that was gilded. And I also got a set of the great books of the Western world. The reason why it was my third set was because I had been a runner-up in the spelling bee before. The person who won had chosen the stereo or something else.

So that was my third one. I kept that one and gave the other two to schools. Now, guess I won a $1,000, and I think that disappeared into a college fund. I don’t remember buying anything with it.

What sort of attention or reception back at school did you get at the time?

Oh, they threw a huge party for me back to my school in Denver, the st. Vincent de Paul school. And then I noticed a lot of places where I went, as people found I’d been the spelling bee champion, they would get very excited. It was a lot of fun. One fella heard that I was a stamp collector and he didn’t know what to do with his old stamp collection; so he sent it to me. That was really nice.

Why is it that the spelling bee resonates with so many different people?

I think all of us have to spell words throughout our life. It’s kind of challenging and we get it wrong a lot. We admire people who just don’t have to worry about it. They seem to get it right.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

But also the spelling bee is this iconic contest that you go through in grade school, and is deeply rooted in American tradition. We all know about quilting bees, and barn raising bees and such. So it’s got a real heritage to it.

How did you get back involved with it? What drew you back?

I won in 1980, and then I went off to high school and college. I became a classics major, and I was on a Fulbright in Switzerland studying German and Greek and Latin. I wrote to them and I said I don’t know if you have any volunteers who work for you, but since I won I learned a lot of Latin and Greek and German a lot more French and I’d be really interested in doing any volunteer work that you need done on just about any aspect of the spelling bee.

I’d been active in the Colorado and Wyoming spelling bees. You know more local spelling bees, and it just so happened at that time that they had a fella who was moving on and they needed somebody to basically sit and fact-check the pronouncer.

And so I was I was the associate pronouncer for 12 years. My role was to sit beside the pronouncer and fact-check live everything that pronouncer said.

How would you do that in real time? From memory?

Oh, it was great because at that point we didn’t have the dictionary on a computer. So I bought three dictionaries and a razor blade. I would cut the page out for each word, and I would have a stack of 1,500 pages. I’d have the word and the number. I’d have the word highlighted and the number behind it. So I would just flip through that stack because there was no way I could up keep flipping through the pages as the words went by.

You’ve seen a lot of really poignant moments and also a few awkward ones at the spelling bee. I think someone even fainted one year. What are the moments that stand out most to you over time?

I think the most impressive moments are when the spellers get a word that they weren’t sure of. They think about it, and then they say Oh, from the Greek group?, and then name the Greek word. Then they get the meaning and either a yes or no answer; and then they say, well, they come from this Greek group. And it just shows the incredible depth of learning that the really high-level spellers have put into this. That really inspires me because people think it matters who wins and it doesn’t really. What matters is all of the learning that happened.