Why the National Spelling Bee is more vital than ever in the age of AI

A question that I perennially encounter when I tell people that I am a professional spelling bee tutor is: “Why bother with spelling bees when we have spell check?” It’s an eminently understandable response, especially when it comes from people who have never watched a bee. Cell phones and computers have no problem storing the entire corpus of the English dictionary and consulting it at a moment’s notice. Like all games and sports, spelling bees aren’t strictly speaking necessary or useful – at least not in an immediately practical way. Yet questions about spelling bees’ utility (or lack thereof) miss what makes them so beloved – why it broke spellers’ and logophiles’ hearts when the Scripps National Spelling Bee was cancelled in 2020 amid the pandemic; why the Bee was quickly revived in 2021 and 2022, with altered rules and a partially virtual format; and why the Bee continues to captivate people internationally, motivating countries like Jamaica, China, and Ghana to send teams to Washington DC to compete.

The rise of artificial intelligence is provoking a great deal of anxiety these days. The development of machine-learning technologies which vastly outstrip human abilities forces us to meditate upon what, in the final analysis, differentiates us from AIs. It also compels us to consider which spheres of human life we think ought to be automated, and which activities we feel should be defended against AI incursions.

Although the development of ChatGPT and other potent natural language processing models marks a new, potentially dangerous phase of the digital age, computers have eclipsed humans for decades without destroying the landscape of intellectual sports. The IBM computer Deep Blue vanquished international grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and IBM Watson trounced all-time Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in 2011. Despite these victories for AI over raw human intellect, people still follow competitive chess and watch quiz shows. Likewise, the National Spelling Bee inspires considerable buzz annually, although we’re now decades into the era of spell-checking software. Spelling bees, chess matches and quiz shows are celebrations of human skill, training, attainment and grace under pressure. Whether machines can duplicate or surpass the achievements of flesh-and-blood competitors is beside the point. And since computers can’t experience nerves and jitters, it is impossible to replicate the lived experience of a human competitor using a machine substitute.

There is a remarkable thrill to watching spellers – who are generally between the ages of nine and 14 – figure out a word on stage, in real time, subject to high degrees of pressure. Spellers have just 75 seconds to ask any questions and 90 seconds total to spell. The ballroom where the spelling happens is a highly pressurized environment. The tension is incredibly sharp – even if you’re watching on TV, you sense spellers’ focus and the force of their concentration. Spellers perform a mental tightrope walk: one misstep, one missed letter, and a journey which has encompassed years and thousands of hours of targeted practice and linguistic study is all over. It is all or nothing: absolute, brutal, and exhilarating to witness.

Competitive spellers are “word detectives”. They receive a training in applied linguistics, often practicing with parents, teachers, and coaches like me. Spellers amass a vast repertoire of Latin and Greek stems – there are at least 800 in my textbook Words of Wisdom – which they can then use to analyze almost any Latin or Greek-derived word. They master the phonetic rules which structure the orthographic systems of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and German. They train their unconscious mind to detect patterns, and they cultivate a sense of when a word is likely to be an exception to the phonetic rules. They acquire the capacity to develop and refine a hypothesis about a word’s spelling in real time using Bayesian inference – iteratively updating their initial hypothesis before they begin spelling based on the answers they receive to their questions.

Spelling isn’t just about dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s. Just like good writing, spelling is to a great extent about the art of paying close, undivided attention. Indeed, attention is the most important element of being a champion speller. Spellers must closely attend to a word’s etymology, the nuances of which may hint that they need to break a language’s usual spelling rules. They must carefully consider the part of speech – in French words, for example, the plural endings -s and -x are generally silent. They must observe and sieve the definition, hunting for keywords: generally, if a word is Latin or Greek, the definition will contain one to three words which are clues to the roots. And they must ponder all pronunciations: if a word has multiple pronunciations, their spelling must satisfy them all, or their spelling is likely to be mistaken.

Nowadays, paying sustained attention is vital and increasingly difficult, a product of cell phones, the internet and “brain fog”. In a world where our consciousness is pulled in a million different directions, the National Spelling Bee is a celebration of knowledge, discipline and focus. Each year, the competition showcases what undivided attention can accomplish. Spellers’ feats of orthographic prowess, executed under high pressure only through intense effort, are an inspiration for us to strengthen our powers of concentration, an invitation for us to attend to the wondrous world around us, even as we’re faced with omnipresent distraction.