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Are you smarter than a seventh-grader?
Today, I met with Amanda White, the Middletown Christian School seventh-grader who will represent the school at the national spelling bee for the Association of Christian Schools International in May.
She won the bee with the word “supposition,” but she told me today that her parents said there were two other words she had to spell in the regional competition that were much harder.
One of the words is “the scientific study of ants” and the other is “something that softens or soothes,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
If you can’t match the word from the definition, I’ll give you the phonetic spelling too. A blog isn’t a great method for a spelling bee, but this is the best I have right now.
The study of ants: mur-mi-kol-uh-jee
Something that softens: i-mol-yuhnt
Are you smarter than a seventh-grader? Find out after the jump.
The correct spellings, per 12-year-old Amanda White (and checked in the dictionary), are:
The study of ants: myrmecology
Something that softens: emollient
And for the record, my spellcheck does not recognize either of those words. But it also doesn’t recognize the word spellcheck or blog.
Amanda is a very bright student. We talked about silly mistakes in spelling bees too: I told her about the time in fourth grade when I missed the word “thyme,” because I thought it was “time” and she told me about how in her first spelling bee, in the second grade at Lebanon Christian School, she missed the word “medium” because she was nervous.
Look for more on her in Thursday’s Journal.
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