A while back, the National Spelling Bee became all the rage, with books like “Bee Season” (also made into a movie), the documentary “Spellbound”, and fictional accounts like the movie “Akeelah and the Bee” making the contest a part of popular culture. The New York Times reports on what could be the next educational contest to seep into the mainstream, the National Vocabulary Championship. This story about the student contest describes how entrants are rewarded for showing off their varied vocabularies, but they don’t have to spell the words. For example, they’ll be given a definition and have to come up with a word or they’ll be presented with three words and have to pick the one that is the least similar in meaning to the others. This year an 18-year-old Wisconsin student picked up the top prize.
A version of this news article first appeared in the Around the Web blog.