{"id":31303,"date":"2006-05-04T10:00:30","date_gmt":"2006-05-04T10:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2006\/05\/04\/on-the-bogusness-of-reporting-the-winning-word-in-a-spelling-bee\/"},"modified":"2006-05-04T10:00:30","modified_gmt":"2006-05-04T10:00:30","slug":"on-the-bogusness-of-reporting-the-winning-word-in-a-spelling-bee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20060504-30\/?p=31303","title":{"rendered":"On the bogusness of reporting the winning word in a spelling bee"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whenever the United States media report on a spelling bee (typically, the Scripps National Spelling Bee<\/a>, the best-known spelling bee in the country), they always report on the “winning word<\/a>“. But the winning word is a bogus metric because the winning word in real life tends to be comparatively easy. It’s the penultimate<\/strong> word that is the hard one.\n In nearly all spelling bees, when the field narrows to just two contestants, if one contestant misses a word, the other contestant must spell that word plus<\/strong> a bonus word to win. Sort of like volleyball. The bonus word is not necessarily a hard word; in fact, just by the principle of regression to the mean, it is likely to be a comparatively easy word. The hard word is the one that knocked out the second-place winner. Look at it this way: Nobody misspelled the winning word, so how hard can it be?\n Consider this hypothetical spelling bee:\n Judge<\/b>: The word is “chiaroscuro”.
Player A<\/b>: c-h-i-a-r-u-s-c-u-r-o.
Judge<\/b>: I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. Player B?
Player B<\/b>: c-h-i-a-r-o-s-c-u-r-o.
Judge<\/b>: Correct. And your next word is “dog”.
Player B<\/b>: d-o-g.
Judge<\/b>: Congratulations, Player B, you’re the winner.\n [9am: How embarrassing. I misspelled “chiaroscuro”.]\n The newspapers all report that “The winning word was ‘dog’,” and people reading the newspaper say, “Pshaw, I don’t know why people get all worked up about this spelling bee thing. Even I can spell ‘dog’.”\n For example, in 2005, the “winning word” was “appoggiatura”, a word any musician can spell in their sleep. The penultimate word was the somewhat more challenging “roscian”.<\/p>\n

This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee will be held on May 31 and June 1, 2006. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever the United States media report on a spelling bee (typically, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the best-known spelling bee in the country), they always report on the “winning word“. But the winning word is a bogus metric because the winning word in real life tends to be comparatively easy. It’s the penultimate word that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-31303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Whenever the United States media report on a spelling bee (typically, the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the best-known spelling bee in the country), they always report on the “winning word“. But the winning word is a bogus metric because the winning word in real life tends to be comparatively easy. It’s the penultimate word that […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}