Think you can spell? Take our Spelling Bee quiz!

To commemorate the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee, held this week in Oxon Hill, Md., we present a quiz of all the winning words since 1925. Click on the link to listen to the word. Most pronunciations of the come from Merriam Webster's dictionary website. A new window will open and you will hear the word. Then close the window and select what you think is the correct spelling. 

(In some cases, the full spelling of the word will appear the URL for the pronunciation. This is unavoidable. To avoid temptation, you should hide your URL bar.)

76. 1925

This word is defined as "any of a genus of chiefly African perennial plants of the iris family with erect sword-shaped leaves and spikes of brilliantly colored irregular flowers arising from corms."

Click here to listen to the word.

Gary Cameron/Reuters
Mignon Tsai, of Abbortsford, British Columbia, Canada, chats with Jennifer Mong of St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada during the Scripps National Spelling Bee semi-finals Thursday at National Harbor, Maryland.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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