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Word: spelldown (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...even righter. Sealfon correctly spelled euonym (meaning: an appropriate name) to win the 1997 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee last week. The home-schooled whiz was such a wreck, she asked to wait offstage between spelling such words as deliquesce and sufflaminate. Her final nine-round spelldown with Prem Murthy Trivedi, 11, of Howell, N.J., ended after he put an extra l in the word cortile (that would be a courtyard). To Sealfon, whose shouted staccato spelling style was startling to the uninitiated, the whole experience must have seemed oneiric. (Look...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: People: Jun. 9, 1997 | 6/9/1997 | See Source »

...such growths as distichous, objurgation, ephelis, abatis and coulisse, that few can spell and few, least of all the handful of youngsters still competing in the ballroom of Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, can translate into everyday English. In the second day and the 19th round of the spelldown, 13-year-old Betty Morgan, whose horn-blowing, flag-waving claque from Washington's St. Thomas Apostle School had cheered her through spinosity, serriform and caliginous, choked up on chiaus. Only four spellers were left: Stanley A. Schmidt, 14, entrant of the Cincinnati Post and station WCPO (each contestant...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The $1,000 Word | 6/23/1958 | See Source »

Washington's vast Federal Security Building. "Office of the Secretary," it read, in shiny new gilt letters. Beyond the door, in a mulberry-and-cream office, Oveta Culp Hobby, the nation's first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was beginning the biggest spelldown of her career. She looked small and feminine behind her broad mahogany desk, but she moved with the poise and confidence of a successful business executive, as she checked "yes" and "no" on a long list of requests for appointments and telephone priorities. Now & then she paused reflectively and puffed on a Parliament, then...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: THE CABINET: Lady in Command | 5/4/1953 | See Source »

...cradle to resurrection, not missing the Lincoln-Douglas debate, in which Abe's words "flashed home like singing bullets, Steve's jumped fence like frisky pullets." Liveliest lines: on an apocryphal schoolroom spelling bee in which Abe Lincoln and his sweetheart Ann Rutledge headed opposing teams. The spelldown...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Radio: Spelldown | 2/19/1940 | See Source »

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