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A curated list of 95 spelling bee words, grouped by difficulty from beginner through national-competition level. Useful for building vocabulary, prepping for spelling bees, or challenging writers with tricky, rarely-used terms.
Study each word, hide it, then type it from memory. Switch to spelling-bee mode to hear each word and type it blind. See your score at the end.
Word 1 of 95 · Score 0
Abscess
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Spelling bee words are chosen to test whether a speller understands how English builds words, not just whether they have memorized a list. Early rounds lean on familiar words with one hidden trap, while later rounds reach into French borrowings, scientific vocabulary, and rare scholarly terms whose spellings follow their source languages. Studying by category, as the groups below are arranged, teaches the patterns that let a speller reason through a word they have never seen.
Familiar words that still eliminate spellers, usually through a silent letter, an unexpected double, or a vowel that sounds like something else.
Words English took from French, keeping spellings where letters go unpronounced and endings like -ette and -oir defy English habits.
Technical terms built from Greek and Latin elements, where knowing combining forms like hydro-, -phyte, and -osis lets a speller assemble the word piece by piece.
Literary and academic vocabulary whose classical roots explain otherwise baffling letter sequences, such as the sacr- in sacrilegious and the -loquy in colloquy.
Words from courts, government, and civic life, a reliable source of bee vocabulary because their formal Latin-derived spellings rarely match casual pronunciation.
Obscure terms drawn from specialist vocabularies and other languages, the kind of words that decide the final rounds of a championship bee.
Tap any word to see it used in a sentence.
The dentist drained the abscess and prescribed a week of antibiotics.
The philosopher argued that free will and perfect foreknowledge amount to an incompossibility.
The architect proposed a pyramidoidal roof for the visitor center.
Whisk the albumen until it holds stiff peaks.
The manual's incomprehensibility sent most buyers straight to online videos.
The quarreling siblings went silent the moment their grandmother entered.
He still uses an antediluvian flip phone and sees no reason to change.
She has a knack for remembering names years after a single meeting.
We split a slice of leek quiche on the cafe terrace.
The soprano leaned into the appoggiatura and let it ache before resolving.
The old palace is a labyrinth of staircases and locked doors.
The tiny harbor town is the quintessence of a postcard fishing village.
The monk's asceticism extended to sleeping on a plain wooden board.
The panelist's logorrhea left the moderator two questions behind schedule.
The reservoir dropped low enough to expose the drowned village's chimney.
The groomsmen fumbled with their boutonnieres in the hotel lobby.
Macerate the strawberries in sugar for an hour before serving.
He put his last chips on black at the roulette table and walked away richer.
The airline canceled the last flight out just as we reached the gate.
The printmaker saved every sheet of maculature to test new inks.
She ordered pastrami on rye with extra mustard.
The designer chose a cerise lining for the gray winter coat.
The biopsy showed the tumor was not malignant, to everyone's relief.
Grandmother considered instant coffee frankly sacrilegious.
The Chihuahua guarded the doorway as if it were a mastiff.
Every guest at the masquerade wore a mask except the host.
Her grandmother taught her scherenschnitte, snipping paper into lacework scenes.
The two judges held a brief colloquy before ruling on the objection.
The caterpillar's metamorphosis was complete by the second week.
The signalman spelled out the warning in semaphore from the hilltop.
A true connoisseur of olive oil can name the grove from one taste.
The oysters arrived with lemon wedges and a shallot mignonette.
The tailor lined the greatcoat with shalloon to keep the cost down.
Bach remains the contrapuntist against whom all others are measured.
The novel's misanthropic narrator warms up exactly once, on the final page.
The lagoon glowed a smaragdine green in the afternoon light.
Her interest in crustaceology began with a bucket of crabs at age seven.
The last box was labeled miscellaneous and weighed more than all the rest.
The operetta's soubrettes stole every scene from the leads.
Jet lag can discombobulate even the most seasoned traveler.
We ordered mussels steamed in white wine and a basket of bread.
The court branded the shipping firm a spoliator for destroying the records.
The rescue horse turned docile after a few patient months.
The bank's neoclassical facade hides a thoroughly modern interior.
The physiology lab still displays a brass stromuhr from its early days.
Cold weather makes his eczema flare along his knuckles.
The forecasters tracked a neutercane forming off the coast.
Bringing pastries for the whole office was supererogatory, and everyone loved her for it.
Her effervescent hosting style made strangers feel like regulars.
As a pastry chef she is nonpareil, and her rivals admit it.
He spent the season as a supernumerary, carrying a spear in the opera's crowd scenes.
The hospital began as an eleemosynary institution funded by parish donations.
The editor omitted the final paragraph, and the essay was better for it.
From the packed suitcase she surmised the decision had already been made.
The memoir closes in an elegiacal register, mourning a vanished coastline.
The orchestra tuned to a single oboe note as the lights dimmed.
The warehouse sat under surveillance for a month before the raid.
Months of practice rebuilt the trumpeter's embouchure after the injury.
Farmers in the region still plow up unexploded ordnance from the war.
Discussing salaries remained taboo in that office long after it stopped being sensible.
The title search revealed an encumbrance on the property from a decades-old loan.
The bobolink appears in older field guides under the species name oryzivorus.
The second law of thermodynamics quietly rules every engine ever built.
The botany exam asked us to sketch an esquamulose lichen from memory.
The parking fine was so outrageous that he framed it.
The clinic runs a support group for people managing trichotillomania.
The retreat promised eudaemonic benefits beyond simple relaxation.
The old families sneered at the parvenuism of the new mansion's gold gates.
Coffee shops are so ubiquitous downtown that two share the same block.
Naming the bakery Rise proved a perfect euonym.
A course of penicillin cleared the infection within days.
The board was unduly cautious, and the opportunity passed to a rival.
Mango flesh near the pit turns fibrous and clings to the knife.
The old penitentiary now hosts guided tours and a gift shop.
The judge ruled the clause unenforceable and struck it from the contract.
Experts declared the letter a forgery from its too-modern ink.
The northern lights are a phenomenon worth losing sleep over.
Linguists reconstruct the ursprache of a language family from its surviving daughters.
The night freight rattled the windows as it passed the farmhouse.
The archivist peered over his pince-nez at the crumbling map.
She continued to vacillate between the two job offers until the deadline forced her hand.
The soldier spent his furlough repainting his mother's porch.
The plaintiff sat calmly while her lawyer read the complaint aloud.
Gothic novels return again and again to the horror of vivisepulture.
The puppy will gnaw through a slipper a week if you let him.
The survey identified a plumbiferous vein worth mining.
A voracious reader, she finishes a novel most evenings.
He hollowed out a gourd to make a birdhouse for the fence post.
He listened to the criticism with a pococurante shrug and changed nothing.
The pathologist noted early xanthosis in the tissue sample.
No hagiographer could have flattered the senator more than his own memoir did.
Watching the eclipse from the summit felt like a rare privilege.
Old photographs show zeppelins moored above the city like silver whales.
The water lily is a classic hydrophyte, rooted in mud and blooming at the surface.
The founder's prospicience kept the company solvent through two recessions.
Organizers draw from the full range of the dictionary, moving from common words with one tricky feature to borrowings from French, German, and other languages, then to technical and scholarly terms. The words are picked so that success depends on understanding etymology and spelling patterns rather than luck. That is why contestants are allowed to ask for a word's language of origin, definition, and use in a sentence.
Study by pattern rather than by alphabetical list. Learn how French endings like -ette and -eau behave, how Greek combining forms such as hydro- and -mania are spelled, and how Latin roots carry stable letter sequences through long words. Then have someone quiz you aloud, because bees are an oral format and spelling in the air is a different skill from spelling on paper.
Each source language spells its sounds in predictable ways, so origin is a decoding key. A k sound in a Greek-derived word is often ch, as in orchestra, while a sh sound in a French borrowing is usually ch, as in quiche. When a speller asks for the language of origin on stage, they are choosing which set of spelling rules to apply.
Start with everyday words that contain a single trap, such as a silent g or an unexpected double letter, before touching rare vocabulary. A beginner who can reliably spell words like privilege, miscellaneous, and freight has learned more transferable patterns than one who memorizes a handful of exotic championship words. Add harder categories one at a time as accuracy improves.
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