Adult Spelling Bee Words

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, I know you love learning new words as much as I do.

I love that look on your face when you hear one you’ve never heard before.

Your head kind of cocks like a little dog.

Huh?

Exactly.

And you remember the last time that you and I were expert spellers in a spelling bee,

In an adult spelling bee, we learned some new ones that we’ve never heard.

Every time you’d think you know a lot about language,

We get accused of knowing a lot about language.

Yep.

Ooh.

Yep.

These were completely new to us.

One of them, remember, was Langlauf.

I didn’t know that one.

I had no idea.

I vaguely guessed it was German, but…

I thought it meant to laugh a long time or something.

But no, no.

It’s spelled L-A-N-G-L-A-U-F, and it means cross-country skiing.

Just any kind of cross-country skiing or a particular kind?

Langlauf.

Langlauf kind.

Okay, there we go.

Very good.

And then there was Ostroform.

Remember Ostroform?

Something related to some kind of shellfish, the shape of a shellfish of some kind.

Shape of an oyster.

Oyster, there we go.

Yep, can you spell it?

No.

O-S-T-R-E-I-F-O-R-M.

See, tricky in the middle.

I know.

This is where they get you.

This is where they get you.

And we’ve participated in these adult spelling bees a few times now.

And they’re nerve-wracking no matter how old you are.

I know, everybody starts the evening jokey and kind of laughing.

We’re all in this together, but by the end it is tense.

And the teams that drop, they’re no slackers.

The journalists kind of fall out of it.

The professional copy editors are done.

The people who write for a living, they’re all out.

And you’ll be left with like the marketing department for a bank to be the winners.

And everyone else is like, oh, next year.

Yeah, there’s that awful pregnant silence, you know, when you’re waiting for the next letter.

But I do love the opportunity to learn new words.

And this is what we do on the show.

We’re part of it anyway.

It is.

We want to talk about all kinds of words on this show.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.