Back in Bees-ness
Everything you wanted to know about the 2026 Boston Citywide Spelling Bee but were afraid to ask
Before the No Kings protest on Boston Common, I spent my Saturday morning at the Boston Public Library, in what has become my annual participation in a crowning of an altogether different kind.
I wrote last year for Defector about my experience as the Pronouncer for the Boston City Spelling Bee. On Saturday, I was back for my fifth year — which included more drama than and a blunder by yours truly that almost cost the eventual champ his trophy.
I wrote in that Defector piece about Tanoshi, the stone-cold champion from two years ago who never once changed his expression. This year’s batch was different. The whole group seemed more expressive, from the kid who said “OK, good” each time he realized he knew the word he’d been given1 to the young man who seemed surprised every time he got his (admittedly often difficult) words correct.
This was Saabir Abdirahman, a nine-year-old who seemed destined for a stumble in the second round:
“MAIDENHAIR.”
“What?”
“MAIDENHAIR.”
“What’s that?”
“Would you like all the information?”
He nodded.
I gave him all the info —including the definition, A North American fern with palmately branched fronds having divergent recurved branches borne on a lustrous reddish or blackish stipe, which didn’t clear things up much — and repeated the word.
“Could you say it slower?”
I’m not actually supposed to do that. At least, I’m not supposed to slow it down to the point where I’m sounding the word out for them.
But I tried again, maybe a beat slower, concentrating on enunciation: “MAIDENHAIR.”
Saabir took the obvious route — spelling both components of the compound word. When the head judge declared him correct, a whoop went up from his cheering section and his mouth formed an astonished “O” as he put his hands to the side of his face.
Then he hit the Griddy2 on the way back to his seat.
Saabir got hit with several other mouthfuls — CONGENIALITY, METAPHORICALLY, STAGFLATION, EXPOSTULATE — on his way to third place. While he never again busted out an end zone dance (the first one was sweet and spontaneous, the result of surprise; more than once would have grated), his jaw dropped more than once.
He’ll be back, and when I told him so afterwards, he had a note for me, “You talk fast.”
I didn’t think I was talking too fast, but I might have been off my game. Perhaps I was shaken by the Bee’s second word, TRULY.
“Truly?” the speller asked.
“TRULY.”
“Truly?”
“TRULY.”
“Truly?”
I stopped to give her all the info, including the definition (one word: indeed), and repated the word.
And she asked again.
“Truly?”
Were we reaching the point of semantic satiation? Were these the right sounds? Was I putting too much of a “d” on the initial consonant? “RO-ADS”?
I improvised my own use-it-in-a-sentence sentence, which I never do:
“Truly, your word is TRULY.”
This got a big laugh, and our speller got the word right.
The bar for comedy is pretty low at the Spelling Bee, my other knock-’em-dead line came when the same speller got the word HOAGIES.
She was unfamiliar, and so asked for all the information.
“It says ‘This word is of unknown origin,’ but I’m pretty sure it’s Philadelphia.”
This hilarious punchline didn’t help our Boston kid. She got dinged out.
The real drama came as the competition narrowed to its last two spellers, 12-year-olds Sanjay Malhotra and Haylee Chen. In my several years of doing this, I’ve never seen a speller miss in the “championship round,” wherein the lone remaining speller has to spell the championship word, otherwise the last speller out returns and we do the final round all over.
On Saturday, not only did we reach the championship round three times, there were seven final rounds, in at least three of which each speller missed their word.
Part of this was my fault.
I’d pegged Sanjay and Haylee as two super-spellers (they were), but I got over-ambitious, turning to word 325 (they only give us 350 before we get to our supplementary list pulling from Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged).
The two words I found there (at 325 and 326) were SANNYASI and HYPAETHRAL.
They both missed.
Realizing I’d overshot, I flipped back 100 words, and then the tension was on.
They missed PALOOKA and DESSICATE.
They nailed GAFFE and SOIREE.
Then, disaster.
Sanjay’s word was PHILOPATRY.
As I wrote in last year’s piece, I try to re-familiarize myself with the Merriam-Webster phonetic spelling stylebook, and I wasn’t too worried about this one. I just glanced at to check where the stress should go.
Now, look, I know that umlauted “a” means it should be a short-“o” sound. I don’t know if I was frazzled from my earlier blunder, or the stress was getting to me, but I confidently and incorrectly pronounced the word into the mic as “Fuh-LAP-uh-tree.”
Only as I was reading the definition (“the tendency of an animal to remain in or return to the area of its birth”) did I realize my error. I admitted it, apologized, and then read it correctly: “Fuh-LOP-uh-tree.”
The primal fear of the Spelling Bee Pronouncer, the number one no-no, is — you guessed it — mispronunciation. Specifically, a mispronunciation that could cause a speller to miss the word.
On the other hand, it’s important to have new experiences.
Sanjay missed the word; my stomach dropped. He put an “a” right where I’d originally pronounced a short “a.”
I never root for one speller over another, and I wasn’t rooting for either speller in this last round. But I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief as Haylee misspelled BUNYANESQUE. Sanjay might or might not win the bee, but it wouldn’t be because of boneheaded Stockman.
In fact, Sanjay did win the bee. As fate (the word list) had it, he got a reprieve with KALEIDOSCOPE. He pumped his fist, so pleased that he knew the word he almost forgot to ask me for all the information.
Haylee got less lucky with FRABJOUS. That left Sanjay to spell BRUME (a French-derived word meaning mist or fog, pronounced like the thing you sweep with).
It was only as he said “Thank you, Mom; Thank you, Dad” into the mic just after he won that I realized this was the younger brother of Sapna Malhotra, the winner of last year’s Bee, who’d done the very same thing. Sapna was so happy for her brother, it was a lovely family affair.
That I almost botched.
Hope they have me back next year!
He did it first on his second word: DEFINITELY.
Note to Mom: this is The Griddy.