Gnarled with a "K"

It was no novelty for contestants in the National Spelling Bee to be in distress, but in the 23rd annual Scripps-Howard contest in Washington, D.C. last week even the judges had a bad time.

The trouble began in the first round when 13-year-old Audrey Mathews of Washington was sent down in tears for spelling supersede with a "c." Four rounds later, red-faced judges called her back after finding that such a respectable authority as Webster's unabridged dictionary accepted Audrey's spelling as a correct variant. Nobody could remember when National Spelling Bee judges had ever had to reverse themselves in such fashion. And they were not through backtracking. Before the contest was over they had done it three times more, belatedly accepting knarled (for gnarled), coruscate with a double "r" and rarefy with an "i," after first waving the spellers out.

By the 20th round, with eight contestants still hanging on, the judges had exhausted their original list of 615 words, had to call time out while they scrabbled in their dictionaries for more stickers. Imprimatur, encomium, umbrage, charlatan and eident eliminated all but three. In Round 29, Jim Bernhard, 12, of Houston, Texas, who had plowed successfully through such words as effluviography, went down on haruspex (he ended it specs). Only plump, wavy-haired Diana Reynard, 12, of East Cleveland, Ohio, and pale, lanky Colquitt Dean, 14, of College Park, Ga., were left.

While the youngsters sipped Cokes, the judges hastily collected 37 more heavy-caliber surprises. Diana and Colquitt went through them all (including meticulosity, syzygy, prorogue, frondesce, cincture, heliotaxis, ectogenous, meerschaum) without a slip. With everybody feeling that honor had been more than satisfied, the judges thereupon declared a draw, the first in the Bee's history. To Winners Diana and Colquitt went twin sets of prizes: $500 checks, trips to New York, gold National Bee emblems set with rubies.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.