Demon Spelling Bee 2025
Here's to the troublemakers.
In “The Demon Championship,” Dmitri Borgmann proposed the following list of the sixty hardest-to-spell words, then subjected it to strong criticism. I don’t agree with all his points (I don’t really care if the list has equal representation of every beginning letter), but I do share his concerns about the following: “A good many of the words on the list can be spelled otherwise without being spelled incorrectly…too many technical terms on the list.”
The real spelling bugaboos for most of us are words like “embarrassment,” which are commonly used and yet still seem to inspire a lot of struggle (it’s two r’s and two s’s, right? How embarrassing.) Another commonly misspelled word is “misspell.” And sometimes, when we’re really tired, we can even mix up “your” and “you’re.”
Still, those aren’t the kinds of words that’d bedevil us on a spelling bee. The real high-level words are those you could see yourself using—not thousand-letter chemical names, not biologist’s Latin, but still not words most of us have learned. For a list of those, I turned to the experts.
The list below is taken from Scripps Spelling Bee’s “Words of the Champions.” These are the hardest new words the bee has added in the last year (cross-referenced between its list of overall new words and its list of “three-bee” extra-hard words). How many do you know to spell? I only knew about nine—and even my spell-checker doesn’t know some of ’em. For a handful, variant spellings are acceptable.
abraum
acidophilus
affiche
agrypnia
anomaliped
anosognosia
ape-ape
appetitost
asylee
baccate
bagwyn
bisbigliando
Boise
Braeburn
caique
calamondin
calvities
carrageenan [preferred] OR carrageenin OR carragheenin
ciénaga [preferred] OR cienega
Delmarva Peninsula
dghaisa
drahthaar
eisteddfod
epistemology
epixylous
genet
Gondwana
guapena
Hamtramck
henotheism
hypaethral
hysteresis
Inugsuk
jerboa
koji
kriegspiel
laccolith
langrage
lunulae
macigno
Makgadikgadi Pans
morion
muliebrity
naricorn
oopuhue
Orinoco
ostium
palooka
pannose
perciatelli
perianth
photovoltaic
piatti
prajna
pralltriller
pratique
promyshlennik
ptyxis
Quito
rapparee
rosemaling
ruscus
sannyasi
scobiform
sprechstimme
succorance OR succourance [British spelling]
Sufi
sybaritic
terra nullius
tikka
tilleul
usufruct
vinaceous
Wampanoag
whydah [preferred] OR whidah
zapateado
I can’t do definitions of all of these and keep today’s post at a reasonable length. But here’s a pic corresponding to each (in order) to pique your curiosity…
Next: Some last words on “Last Words.”
variant spellings are acceptable..
Varient spelings R exceptable.