Full disclosure: I didn’t make it past the first round of my third-grade spelling bee.
Oh, sure, I had my revenge. I was school champion of the sixth-grade geography bee and got knocked out at the state level — but being the competitive type, not making it to the school finals, to say nothing of getting past the class level, smarted a bit.
If I had it to do all over again, however, perhaps I could have had a better chance — if I was only a little more woke. (Sorry — if I only were a little more woke. Subjunctive mood and all. No wonder I lost so early on.)
According to The National News Desk, the 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee has made a change for young competitors. The new rule? If you want to spell “women” as “womyn,” they’ll accept that.
“Study lists for the contest, which is open to students under 16, have been published by multiple schools. The lists show the organization is allowing the spelling of the noun as either ‘womyn’ or ‘women,’” the Friday report read.
The word appears on a study list which “includes 50 challenging third grade words,” according to a sample list we took from the Murray School District in Utah, which is taken from the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
However, the list has appeared elsewhere online:
You can’t make this up. Scripps National Spelling Bee Competetion says third graders can spell the word “women” as “womyn”
A spelling bee pic.twitter.com/llLiYpIug7
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 11, 2024
Should officials eliminate the alternate spelling for “women”?
Yes: 100% (2 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Along with “giraffe,” “muster,” “spiral” and “snazzy,” you have “women**” — two asterisks, indicating “preferred spelling” — “OR womyn.”
Only one other of the 50 words has the double-asterisk treatment: “bazaar,” which is preferred to be spelled with three A’s, although they’ll take the two-A “bazar” as well.”
Feminists have often supported the “womyn” to “women” — so as to distinguish it from “man” or “men” by making it stick out like a sore thumb in badly written liberal-arts college theses.
“A page updated in 2020 on New Discourses, a website that describes itself as an ‘educational resource’ for the ‘politically homeless,’ states that some writers who spell words by avoiding ‘man’ or ‘men’ see them as ‘an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define women by reference to a male norm,’” the article noted.
“This belief is supported further by the identification (mostly antiquated now) of ‘man’ with ‘mankind,’ meaning all of humanity,” the article noted. “It is therefore an act of resistance to male dominance (patriarchy) and misogyny to deliberately remove the ‘man’ from ‘woman’ by changing the a to another letter.”
However, New Discourses isn’t running this shindig. But the folks from Scripps said that they’re not the ones running the show, either.
“A spokesperson for the Scripps National Spelling Bee told TNND all of the words used in its program are pulled from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, which is its official dictionary,” the report stated.
“The spokesperson added the spelling bee looks to ‘include alternate spellings for any words that have them listed in Merriam-Webster’ when building its lists.”
“During competition, our policy is to accept any correct spelling listed in our official dictionary that isn’t marked archaic or obsolete,” the spokesperson told the outlet. “The alternate spelling ‘womyn’ is therefore included on our study list because it is listed as an alternate spelling for ‘women’ in Merriam-Webster.”
“The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary is the final authority and sole source for the spelling of all words offered in competition.”
Meanwhile, GOP Kansas state Rep. Samantha Poetter-Parshall — who sits on her local school board — called it a “crazy indoctrination of our children.”
“As a school board member, I can possibly make it so no alternate spelling of words are used,” she told local outlet The Sentinel. “Or at least attempt that.”
“On the state level, since there is no funding directly going to KPA I am not sure what to do to stop this crazy indoctrination of our children.”
And, on the personal level, I’m protesting my loss. I’m not saying I got knocked out because I spelled it “womyn,” but this is my lived experience — and who are you to deny my lived experience, etymological oppressor?
The only downside? We’d all probably just get participation trophies no matter how well we did these days, anyhow.
Wokeness giveth, wokeness taketh away.
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