It’s that time of year again and Office-Watch.com has a little fun seeing how Microsoft Word’s dictionary compares to the winners of the Scripps (US) National Spelling Bee.
Surprisingly, Word did better in 2016 than past years, despite the words being harder. Still, no chance of Word reaching the finals in 2013, 2014, 2015 and now 2016.
Here’s a list of the words used in the 2016 Final (in order of use) as they appear in Word with the US English dictionary.
(Using Word 2016 for Windows with US English proofing)
Word spell checked as ‘OK’ 10 words including one of the two final words. That’s out of the 60 words in the final.
Because the last two years have had joint winners, the words were made harder in 2016. In 1940 the winning word was ‘Therapy’, in 2016 the finalists ended with “Feldenkrais” and “gesellschaft”. FiveThirtyEight.com has an interesting analysis of the words used in Spelling Bee finals.
We sourced the list from Wikipedia where the words have links to definitions (doab is a piece of land between two rivers).
Here’s how Word ‘scored’ in 2015 , 2014 and 2013.
