It’s not as if spelling bees exist only in English. But there are plenty of languages in which it would be difficult or pointless to try to mount a serious spelling competition; they have such tight correspondence between sounds and letters that simply hearing a word gives you almost all the information needed to write it down. In English that is pretty comically not the case. “The same sound can be spelled multiple ways, and similar spelling can produce completely different pronunciations,” says Esteban Touma from the language-learning site Babbel, which recently put together an analysis of the Scripps bee’s official study guides. This is precisely what makes an English spelling bee exciting. It is, in fact, part of why spelling bees exist in the first place. A bee is not simply a game of memorizing those irregularities. It asks you to understand the guts and the history of the language itself. Stay in touch: Like this email? Forward it to a friend and help us grow. Loved a story? Hated it? Write us a letter at magazine@nytimes.com. Did a friend forward this to you? Sign up here to get the magazine newsletter.
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