Obscure Spelling Words

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Allison.

Hi, Allison. Welcome to the show.

Hey there, Allison. What’s up?

Hi.

Where are you calling from, by the way?

North Richland Hills, just outside of Fort Worth, Texas.

Okay, great. How can we help?

My 10-year-old son recently won our school spelling bee.

Hey, Mazel Tov.

Yeah, and he is going to the District B.

And they gave us a list of words to study.

And when we got this list, there are a whole bunch of words we just have never seen before in my life.

And may never see again.

Probably not.

How many words are we talking about here?

Oh, a thousand?

Okay.

Oh, my gosh.

Total.

The words that are a complete surprise are a lot less than that.

But I spent a lot of time trying to find out what some of these words were, and I couldn’t find some of them.

So my question is, how do words get taken out of the dictionary?

At what point do they say, you know, we’re never going to use this word again.

Let’s get rid of it.

So you’ve got all these difficult words, and I’m suspecting a lot of them are foreign or very rare, right?

Well, a lot of them are German.

A lot of them are German, right.

Well, there’s a couple difficult things happening here.

First of all, all the spelling bees that I know in the United States choose their words from the Webster’s New International Dictionary, third edition, which is a gigantic unabridged dictionary published in 1961.

Once a word is enshrined in a dictionary, it tends not to leave, at least in the unabridged dictionaries.

In the fourth edition of this big Merriam-Webster unabridged dictionary, those words will still be in there.

They may be marked archaic or obsolete or now rare, but they’ll still be in there.

And so you’ve got this kind of disconnect between what’s happening now with a 10-year-old in his life or even you in your life and what was happening in 1961 or in the preceding decades when that dictionary was being put together.

But some dictionaries do take out words all the time, right?

Yeah, but it’s the smaller, non-unabridged dictionaries.

It’s the desk dictionaries or the college dictionaries where it behooves them to keep them small so they’ll fit in a backpack or they’ll fit nicely next to your other reference works on your desk at the office.

And that’s the advantage of online dictionaries, right?

You don’t have to cull from the herd.

Yeah, something like Oxford English Dictionary Online or even just dictionary.com chooses from a wide variety of sources.

Yeah, you don’t have to cull them.

The rareness of these words is what makes them great spelling bee words, though, Allison.

I got to say, because if all the thousand words were words that everyone knew, how would you differentiate the excellent spellers from just the pretty good spellers?

Indeed.

You got to push the limit.

So it sounds sort of like you’re saying the unabridged dictionary is more like a word museum,

And the shorter dictionaries are more like the word phone book or something.

A little bit, yeah.

That’s not a bad way of looking at it.

The unabridged are updated far less often, but they are more exhaustive.

And then the dictionaries that you might have on your desk or put in your backpack and take to school,

They’re going to be updated every few years and be far more current

And have far less of the words that your son is going to have to spell.

And you, if you’re helping.

It’s been great.

I mean, he’s learned some really fabulous new words.

His favorite word now is ersatz.

Oh, nice.

And that’s a good word, right?

It is.

It’s great.

You know, you’ve got to tell us, Allison.

Send us an email when the contest is over and let us know how he did, all right?

I will do that.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.