speller

As she was (very bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary complications arose between them, which I was always called in to solve.

It had cost Adam a great deal of trouble and work in overhours to know what he knew over and above the secrets of his handicraft, and that acquaintance with mechanics and figures, and the nature of the materials he worked with, which was made easy to him by inborn inherited faculty--to get the mastery of his pen, and write a plain hand, to spell without any other mistakes than must in fairness be attributed to the unreasonable character of orthography rather than to any deficiency in the speller, and, moreover, to learn his musical notes and part-singing.

I applied myself with greater earnestness than ever to the mastering of what was in the "blue-back" speller.

'That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord,' replied Sam; 'I never had occasion to spell it more than once or twice in my life, but I spells it with a "V." '

Many spellers gain notoriety as "spellebrities" outside their school and community, first through ESPN's bee features then on Instagram, YouTube, and TED Talks.

Even though the contest dragged on close to midnight and the words kept getting more difficult, the spellers were undaunted.

An annual spelling bee held in the US has been brought to its knees by eight spellers who were too smart for any challenge thrown their way.

"We will soon run out of words that will possibly challenge you," Jacques Bailly, the Bee's longtime official pronouncer, said at the end of the 17th round, calling the eight winners "the most phenomenal assemblage of spellers in the history of this storied competition."

In this study, data triangulation of error analyses and semi-structured interviews of students and their teachers generated a rich description of the strategies used and articulated by low-achieving spellers compared with high-achieving spellers across Years Three to Six, aged between eight and 12 years.

There were more problems in store for the spellers when words such as BALLISTIC, MASSACRE and VIGILANTE also could not be spelt correctly and Momin Zafar, the able pronouncer, came to words with silent letters such as 'FLANEUR', 'TRANCHE, 'MOUE', 'MANQUE', 'METIER', etc.

Poor spellers tend to retain their status as poor spellers over time

Mark Weakland's Super Spellers: Seven Steps to Transforming Your Spelling Instruction (9781625311021, $32.00) is especially recommended for teachers who have been frustrated over how spelling is taught, and who want an alternative.