Do the kids get much internet access before the events? If not, I doubt this is much of a scandal. Maybe a coincidence or your option #2...

Spelling Bees seems so pure as the driven snow that I have a hard time thinking poorly of them. :-)

The "winning word" is just the one next on the list, though. I doubt people would be thinking conspiracy if it were just a word in the middle of round 14.

We've just done a cursory cross-referencing of all the words in the Bee and those featured during the last month at Dictionary.com. For now anyway, 'autochthonous' looks like the only match. Now what was the word that made the runner-up faint? maybe there's something there...

The word that made Akshay Buddiga faint was "alopecoid." After fainting, he stood up again and spelled the word correctly. He went on to take 2nd place.

Bling is right, if I understand it right there is no word for the final word (or would that be "penultimate"). Unlike a tournament which has a set number of rounds or a quiz which has a "best of," a spelling bee is sudden-death, play till you drop, like dance-off's in the 1920's. Unless of course autochthonous was planned as the finale -- which, it seems is the bigger scandal -- and Akshay Buddiga took a fall. Congress should have hearings.

Penultimate means next to last--not last.

And his name is Bing, not Bling.

Wow; a post with comments enabled. I thought they were gone for good. :-) Was there an issue of some kind with them, Jason?

I agree with Ry; no word should be "planned" as the last word. I'm betting this whole thing is just a coincidence, though.

-- Kip

it's worse!
it's related to the conspiracy theory that bush actually has a brain and isn't a puppet of the oil-military machine

how you ask?
the CIA was on the track to finding out but.....

Jason, you should have comments on the remaindered links...

I went to high school with Ashley White, and I had no idea she was a mother. She hadn't told anyone she was in Spellbound until a few of us saw it and pressed her about it. She was very outgoing but she didn't talk much about herself at all. She must have somehow hidden the pregnancy from everyone.

Thanks for the link! I'll see if i can track down some of my friends back in DC to see how she is doing.

Hmmm, I have a feeling that I'm walking straight into this but....
Didn't the same sort of thing happen prior to D-Day?

hehe...I liked the way you listed your opinions as 1, 2, c, and 4.

Why is it called a Spelling Bee?

It's short for Spelling, Beeatch.

A spell B, hehe I would not get past the 1st round. I still cant spell big words. If I was a super hero write, spelling would for sure be my weakness.

The remaindered links were *all* comment enabled for a while. I visited more often when that was the case, the opportunity to participate in appropriate ways seemed to lure me in. :-)

"Bee" as in spelling bee is an old word with rural origins. I've also heard of quilting bees.

I was a competitor in the 2004 Scripps National Spelling Bee and it was definitely not a scam. The National Word list is chosen months in advance so that the pronouncer has time to make sure he can pronounce all of the words and that he has all of their definitions and origins. There is absolutely no way that the winner could have known that "autochthonous" was going to be his winning word, nor could dictionary.com have known. He won because he memorized all of the words in the dictionary and their meanings. He worked hard, so he won. The Spelling Bee is not the kind of place where scams and dirty underhand tricks occur... it's a family event and it is purely based on the contestants' knowledge and amount of hard work and studying. So the answer to the original question is that it was a coincidence.

Adding to this conspiracy--the word the 2nd place kid got out on (scharmerei), a German word, was pronounced incorrectly (to the best of my knowledge). I've had 5 years of german, and the pronouncer pronounced it as "schwermerei"

However, i could be wrong. I will be checking with my German exchange partner tomorrow.

I am german, and "scharmerei" certainly isn't a german word ;-)
Schwermerei - or better Schwärmerei (with an ä) - is and means something like enthusiasm or fency...

Reminds me of the story, in the news once again these days, about the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles that featured code names of the D-Day beaches in the days prior to the invasion. An interesting story, and, ultimately, not a coincidence, as people had long concluded.

My mistake - I meant to say that "schwarmerei" came from German.

They said that "schwarmerei" came from German, so I assumed it was pronounced like it would be in German. It's likely that the person who first used it as an English word just misspelled/mispronounced it and it became english.

I always knew that there was a scandal with dictionary.com

Autochthonous has an antonym by the way-heterochthonous.
Like-when it comes to North America-the Sioux are (relatively) autochthonous and Europeans are heterochthonous.
So really autochthonous should be revised to homochthous-cuz Indians are gay and shouldn't be allowed to marry.

P.S. those Oxford experts are wrong to say only four words end in -dous. Macropodous is perfectly serviceable and not all that obscure.

Are the odds really that great against this happening? After all, the "word of the day" list and the spelling bee final rounds will traffic exclusively in rarely-used and very unusual words. So the English language as a whole is not the appropriate base for calculating the probability of a word appearing in both; it would take a true lexicographer to properly calculate the odds.

I can't believe someone would even act like that was a scandal. even if autochthonous was the "Word of the Day" the day before the spelling bee, the kid who won had studied that word already... precisely why he didn't write it on the back of his name card with his finger like he did with most of the words he got (if not all). he was crying on the last word because he knew it and he knew he won. it was no set up. thats so ridiculous to think that they tried to set it up so that kid could win. he studied his ass off after last year's competition. he's a smart kid, as well as the rest of them. its an innocent competition to give these kids money (which they are probably smart enough to invest in college one day) who tried hard and performed the best. * on another note, i jumped and felt so bad for the kid who got second place when he fainted earlier in the competition. poor guy :(

I, as a competitor in the Bee, completely agree with Abbey. And, as to the whole thing about the word "schwarmerei" - it is pronounced exactly the way the pronouncer said it. Look it up: the pronunciation is "shfer-muh-riy". That is how the pronouncer said it, and even if he wants to change the pronunciationt to make it easier for the speller to sound out, he cannot because it is against the rules. He has to go strictly by the dictionary pronunciation. Hope that clears up this whole "scandal" nonsense.