For bee to be a success it needs the right words

“Cortege” got demoted after the death of Princess Diana, when the media used the French-sounding word over and over to describe the funeral procession.

These days, it’s a softball word for the best of the 286 spellers gathering in the nation’s capital for the 80th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. The competition begins today and culminates with a Thursday night finish on ABC.

The young competitors have spent months poring over word lists and dictionaries, probing the depths of etymology in an attempt to answer one nagging question: What strange word is Carolyn Andrews going to come up with next?

“It is tricky,” said Andrews, who has the daunting task of finding competitive words for the spelling bee. “What’s easy for one person might be difficult for another. That is the hardest part of developing the word list.”

“Cortege” is one example of a word that simply lost its degree of difficulty when used in everyday vocabulary, she said.

Andrews, whose son won the bee in 1994, has been the word list manager since 1998, leading a three-person panel that spends the year looking for words in likely -- and unlikely -- places. One year she added “cloisonne” (an enamel process used to make jewelry) after spotting it in a mail-order catalog. In a perfect world, all of the words in each round would be equally difficult to spell. No one wants to hear that audience groan that says: “Oh, that’s an easy one.”

“There is no objective way to evaluate the difficulty level of words,” said Paige Kimble, the spelling bee’s director. “There are words that people are exposed to more frequently because of where they live or because of their culture or because of their age.”

Last year’s winner, Katharine Close, 14, of Spring Lake, N.J., said she didn’t know some of the words that knocked out her competitors. “It’s just a matter of luck that I didn’t get those, and I got words that I did know how to spell,” she said.