Round two much tougher than last year

Thu, May 29, 2008 - 11:41 AM

12:55 p.m.

The number of misspellings in round two more than tripled from 2007 to 2008.

While only 27 spellers missed in 2007's round two, 94 were eliminated this year.

The difficulty of words increased significantly from last year. Words such as jealous, weird, and Wednesday made the list last year compared to this year's batch of stagnicolous, raiment, osoberry, oniomania, and palmyra.

The increased difficulty should lower the "threshold of 80" cut to 20 or 21, at the most.

The names of spellers making round three will be updated shortly. We'll keep you posted.

-Josh Dawsey