The words weren’t always this hard. When students first battled the dictionary in a National Spelling Bee in 1925, the winning speller knew the winning word because it was a plant in his family’s Kentucky garden. Two years ago, the last time that spellers competed to win the Scripps national bee, one winner was asked about an adjective related to a hypothetical force proposed by a Prussian scientist in the 19th century.

Source: New York Times July 08, 2021 13:52 UTC