What Are the Hardest Words in the Spelling Bee?

English is chock-full of tricky spellings. Because it pulls together inspiration from a lot of different languages, including Greek, Latin, French, German, and more, there are many words that defy standard phonetic rules. And to further complicate things, English is rife with homonyms, silent letters, and obscure meanings. 

Nowhere are these challenges more evident than in the ritual of the school spelling bee. Spelling competitions have been documented in American literature since the 19th century;  Mark Twain briefly referenced a “spelling fight” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. The most famous such bee today, of course, is the yearly Scripps National Spelling Bee, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year.

The winning words from the Scripps National Spelling Bee follow the pattern of diverse language origins and esoteric meanings. The first winning word (in 1925), “gladiolus,” comes from Latin and refers to a type of iris plant. The most recent winning word (in 2025), “éclaircissement,” is a direct carryover from French — it means “a clearing up of something obscure.” In the 2023 Spelling Bee, stumpers such as “pataca” (a monetary unit in China) and “pharetrone” (a sponge of the group Pharetrones) eliminated contestants in the final rounds. In 2024, the very first word, “desmotrope” (a form of a chemical element related to another by desmotropism), was misspelled as “desmatrope.”

In the history of the Scripps bee, there have been just two words that no finalists were able to spell, and so the competitions ended in a draw: “schappe” (German origin, “a yarn or fabric of spun silk”) in 1957 and “esquamulose” (Latin, related to a very specific plant leaf structure) in 1962. 

Other spelling games show similar trends. The New York Times’ Spelling Bee game, for example, analyzed the puzzles that stumped readers the most, and identified the hardest words from 2025 as “pellicle,” “lacteal,” and “hamartia.” These words follow the general pattern of obscure words with French, Latin, and Greek roots, respectively. 

Spelling is a weirdly and consistently difficult part of English. Participants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee study for months, memorizing thousands of words and linguistic patterns. Most of us have no reason to do that as adults, but you can continue to improve your skills by reading to learn new words and playing some of the many online spelling games out there, including Quordle and Blossom, from Merriam-Webster.