AbbyNormal's Study Ways

Even though I am no longer eligible for spelling bees, I love helping other spellers! If you ever need any study help, let me know!

I spent a lot of time going through the dictionary. I made it almost through the Cs before I began just studying random words in the dictionary. The way I learn words is by writing them down in a notebook along with the etymology, part of speech, and pronunciation. I also went through all of New Nat's Notes, altough I certainly didn't memorize all of it, as the word I misspelled in Round 5 was in that book.

I also spent a lot of time learning word roots and etymology patterns. For etymology patterns and spelling rules, I used Hexco's book, "Why Isn't Phonetic Spelled the Way It Sounds?" My mother and grandmother were extremely helpful and made flashcards for root words, and those definitely helped me.

My dad and my sister helped me make a list that contained all of the Italian music words in the dicitonary, the Hawaiian words in the dictionary, the words ending with -lous in the dictionary, etc. We used merriam-websterunabriged.com with this. Several words in this list appeared in the Bee, such as bisbigliando, heiau, and ericeticolous.

This is a nice study way-- I'll use all of them to help guide me!

Lena from the finals is actually sending me her used NNN
Instead of looking through the dictionary, though, you should've used the CD that came with it, went on "Advanced Search," and then put "music" in definition, and then "Italian" in etymology, and then ALL of them would've popped up, you would've saved so much time

Actually, I used merriam-websteruabridged.com which works faster than the CD. I've tried both ways.