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I'm not laodicean about it: Very interested in whether any IT-related words snuck into Scripps National Spelling Bee

By Alpha Doggs on Fri, 05/29/09 - 3:53pm.

I couldn't justify the time it would take to plow through all of the hundreds of words used in this week's Scripps National Spelling Bee to find out if any IT-related words made it in, but I did go through the words from the final 10 rounds and browsed the rest. I didn't find a lot, surprisingly (I'd figure tech would be a good place from which to find tricky words), but here's what I did find:

One of the test words was cubicle.

I also spotted a couple of words used as company names in the IT/networking market:

Azimuth, which Merriam-Webster defines as "an arc of the horizon measured between a
fixed point (as true north) and the vertical circle passing through the
center of an object usually in astronomy and navigation clockwise from
the north point through 360 degrees
," is also the name of a wireless testing company we've written about.

Xebec, which Dictionary.com defines as "a small, three-masted vessel of the Mediterranean, formerly much used by corsairs, now employed to some extent in commerce," was also the name of a "disk drive controller company in the 1980's, it provided the controller for the IBM PC/XT" (Wikipedia ).

For those of you who don't appreciate spelling bees, check out the movie Spellbound , a documentary about what these kids go through. Both inspiring and scary.

P.S. Wow, is there really no spell checker in our blog system?

 

About Alpha Doggs
The future of networking as seen through the works of university and other labs.

Our mission is to give you a peek into the future of networking by tracking "alpha" research at university and other labs and at companies based on this work. Your Alpha Doggs editor is Bob Brown, Network World Online Executive Editor, News.
 

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