The US Scripps National Spelling Bee is over for another year with another tie between two amazing young people. Both winners are impressive to us mere mortals but also compared to Microsoft Office.
As we have for the last few years, we’ve made a list of the championship words to see how Microsoft Office’s English dictionary fares. We do this for a bit of fun. The words are usually quite obscure and won’t be found in any regular dictionary (paper or virtual).
Here’s the list of 47 words used in the final rounds as they appear in Word.
Using Microsoft Word 2016 (public preview), US English.
The Word dictionary only found four words: bacchius, bouillabaisse, crannog and hacek.
That’s worse than Word’s 2014 result but better than the measly score of two in 2013.
All this shows that a red squiggly line in Word isn’t the last word on spelling. There’s the very real possibility that the word is right but isn’t in the Microsoft Office dictionary.
Here’s the same words in text for you to copy and try in your Office dictionary. This time in the order used during the final rounds.
bouillabaisse
cerastes
hacek
cytopoiesis
crannog
bacchius
cocozelle
Samadhi
Albumblatt
billiken
Hippocrene
Backfisch
Poikilitic
Gnathostome
Población
Commissurotomy
Réclame
Tartarean
Oflag
Bayadere
Iridocyclitis
Canossa
Tortillon
Minhag
Cibarial
zygoneure
acritarch
bouquetière
caudillismo
thamakau
scytale
tantième
cypseline
urgrund
filicite
myrmotherine
sprachgefühl
zimocca
nixtamal
hippocrepiform
paroemiology
scacchite
pipsissewa
Bruxellois
Pyrrhuloxia
scherenschnitte
nunatak
