Would You Qualify for the Scripps National Spelling Bee?

Last week, eighth grader Sukanya Roy took the title of the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bees ever by rattling off the correct letters of “Cymotrichous” with the same ease as if the judges had asked her to spell “cat.” See if your spelling skills are up to par with hers by taking the Scripps spelling test to see if you would make it to the semifinals.

If you're so inclined, you can also check out the 10 final words of the spelling bee over at mental_floss to see if you know what they mean, let alone spell them correctly (I was 0 for 10 in the vocab department).

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I only got 21. Pfft, and I used to play Merriam-Webster's Spell Jam a lot.

Are the questions pulled by Google Analytics at all? I got "kafkaesque" as one of my words and I've been googling Kafka.

As a last criticism, are they trying to find really obscure words? I thought enantiodromia was an obscure word but at least it has its roots in Latin and isn't some catch-phrase made up in the 90s to affectionately refer to the internet, like "infobahn". Then again, like I say "normativity" is a word that has been in use in philosophy for centuries but makes no appearance in the world's dictionaries. Something like "irregardless" despite it being nonsensical is more likely to be printed in the pages of Merriam-Webster or Oxford.

But it's like this: m-w.com/medical Merriam Webster's online medical dictionary contains an entry for the word Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconsiosis which is little more than an instance of a really long word used to refer to something with a much shorter synonym, but m-w's medical dictionary does not contain simultanagnosia, intermetamorphosis or proposagnosia, all of which are quite common medical terms compared to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconsiosis. I suspect these words were chosen to be in the bee and in the dictionary because of their popularity, they may not even conform to the rules governing english, as in the case of 'irregardless' - which is in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary and claims it is a real word in use since the early 20th century.
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Hey, I knew 3 (definitions) of the words in the final 10, but certainly wouldn't have in middle or high school. Orgeat, jugendstil (direct from German, which I am fluent in), and the curly hair one (which I won't try to spell without the page in front of me.)
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I am not sure about the Scripps competition, but the one we did at our school for the national competition came with a list of possible words. As the competitions went on, the lists changed and got longer and much more complicated. But the competitors had some idea, because I can't imagine who would ever just happen to know the words the used in the finals?
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Heh, this takes me back. I actually got to the semifinals in 1997 as an 8th grader, but promptly got knocked out on a word that I would have recognized in text form but didn't recognize aurally. Oh well. I'll have to find eternal glory doing something whose playing field can't be instantly leveled by computers. :P
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