How Do You Spell a National Bee Legend? J-A-C-Q-U-E-S B-A-I-L-L-Y!

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By Beth Saulnier

For Jacques Bailly, PhD ’97, the winning word at the 1980 Scripps National Spelling Bee was “elucubrate”—which, aptly enough, means “to work out or express by studious effort.” At 14, Bailly was crowned America’s spelling champion, taking home $1,000 and a nice set of encyclopedias. (Remember those?)

But his career in orthography didn’t end there.

“All I do is sit there and talk like I normally do, though I try to pronounce words a bit crisper. It just feels like a mini-conversation with each speller.”

Among Bailly’s favorite Bee moments are some now-classics, like the time in 2007 when he gave a boy the word “sardoodledom”—and the kid completely cracked up, before spelling it correctly and returning to his chair with enormous glee.

(According to Merriam-Webster, whose unabridged volume is the Bee’s official dictionary, it means “mechanically contrived plot structure and stereotyped or unrealistic characterization in drama.”)

All I do is sit there and talk like I normally do, though I try to pronounce words a bit crisper. It just feels like a mini-conversation with each speller.

Another howler came the following year, when Bailly gave a competitor the word “numnah” (“a felt or sheepskin pad placed between a horse’s back and the saddle to prevent chafing”)—but the horrified boy thought he’d said “numbnut” (“the stupidest of the stupid,” per one of its less profane definitions in Urban Dictionary).

Then there was 2019, the year of the “octo-champs”—when the event crowned a wildly unprecedented eight winners.

Says Bailly: “We went into the finals, and I vividly remember calculating that, at the rate the spellers were missing, it would take until about four in the morning to get a winner.”

Ultimately, organizers declared co-champions—which, perhaps surprisingly, the octad embraced.

“The media kept pushing them, asking, ‘Don’t you want to figure out who’s champion?’ They said, ‘No, we like it this way,’” Bailly recalls. “And I agree. I think it’s very nice to spread the joy and the rewards.”

Among Bailly’s favorite Bee moments are some now-classics, like the time in 2007 when he gave a boy the word “sardoodledom”—and the kid completely cracked up, before spelling it correctly and returning to his chair with enormous glee.

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Such an outcome became much less likely after the 2021 addition of a “spell-off,” a rapid-fire round in which remaining contestants have 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible.

The Bee also now includes rounds in which competitors tackle multiple-choice questions on vocabulary—ensuring that they not only can spell words correctly, but understand their meanings.

“We had reached a pitch of incredible preparation by a core group of spellers who were so good that it was very hard to get them to miss,” Bailly explains. “When you bring in vocabulary, it requires a lot more study on their part, and makes it more possible to efficiently get to a champion.”

Asked to contemplate the enduring popularity of the Bee—which marked its centennial in 2025—Bailly cites multiple reasons for its appeal.

There’s the fact that it’s so democratic, with kids from a wide variety of backgrounds competing; then there are the contestants’ reactions, which are often entertainingly unvarnished.

We had reached a pitch of incredible preparation by a core group of spellers who were so good that it was very hard to get them to miss.

Plus, he says, “it’s pretty dramatic; there’s this moment of, ‘Will they get it right? Will they get it wrong?’ There’s also, ‘Do I know how to spell that word? Do I even know what that word is?’ There’s this slack-jawed amazement that these kids know these words that adults don’t.”

Bailly’s love affair with competitive spelling began in the sixth grade, when his teacher tapped him to be on the spelling team at his Catholic school. He made it to the national competition on his third try and took home the title.

“If you want to win the National Spelling Bee, you have to make great friends with the dictionary,” he says. “You need to decide, ‘Today I’m going to look at all the words that come from Hawaiian, and figure out how they got into English and what they mean’—and then do the same thing with German, and so on.”

Plus, he says, “you have to really enjoy words—to have this attitude of ‘That’s a neat one; I’ll put it in my collection.’”

There’s this slack-jawed amazement that these kids know these words that adults don’t.

A Brown undergrad, Bailly did his Cornell classics dissertation on a lesser-known Platonic dialogue.

He began volunteering for the Bee in 1990, having offered his services as a past winner with facility in French, German, Greek, and Latin; he started out as an associate pronouncer, taking the lead nearly a quarter-century ago.

“For a lot of kids, the stranger and weirder a word is, the easier it is,” Bailly observes. “A word like ‘humuhumunukunukuapuaa’ [the Hawaiian state fish] is memorable. It’s the words like ‘accommodate’ and ‘embarrass’—those are the hard ones.”

Top: Pronouncing during a preliminary round in 2025. (E.M. Pio Roda / Scripps National Spelling Bee)

Published April 30, 2026

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