Sealfon '05: Spelling her way to success, Princeton

She stares into space. Pulls her fingers through her hair. Presses her hands against her cheeks. Wipes her forehead.

"S," she yells, mouthing the letter into her hand before announcing it into the microphone.

"U."

She again raises her hands to her mouth before saying the letter.

She continues: "F-F-L-A-M-I-N-A-T-E. Sufflamin-ate."

The judge nods. She is correct.

Rebecca Sealfon '05 is in the middle of a verbal war, going head-to-head, word-to-word, letter-to-letter with Prem Trivedi in the 1997 Scripps-Howard National Spell-ing Bee. The field of 250 spellers from North America has dwindled to two.

She and Trivedi would duel for 22 rounds in one of the longest competitions in the bee's 75-year history. It was also one of the most memorable bees for the tension, for the ESPN coverage, but mostly for Sealfon's distinctive style that contrasted starkly with the other spellers.

Most people think of spelling bee champions as polite children who stand with perfect postures and say the letters quietly into the microphone.

But Sealfon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., is emotional and physically expressive. She tells the audience what she's thinking when she's spelling a word. She yells the letters into the microphone:

"D-E-L-I-Q-U-E-S-C-E."

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She's right again.

Trivedi gets "philhellene" and "griffonage." Sealfon gets "bourgade" and "duenna."

But they weren't always right.

"Dulcinea," meaning mistress or sweetheart, was the tripper for Sealfon, who was 13 at the time.

"I never read 'Don Quixote,'" she said in an interview this week. "This is Don Quixote's sweetheart.

"So I didn't know what this was about. I was thinking about the roots. You are allowed to ask what the origin is. I was thinking about how I could guess it correctly. I knew it was Spanish and that the double 'l' was pronounced, 'y.' "

She spells its "D-U-L-C-E-N-I-L-L-A." The bell dings, signaling an incorrect answer. Luckily for Sealfon, Trivedi is also wrong. They continue to spell.

Trivedi gets "foudroyant," meaning dazzling. Sealfon gets "nomothetic," an adjective related to lawmaking.

Round 22 comes, and the stage in Washington, D.C. feels like high noon at the OK Corral. Judges talk of a draw. But Trivedi slips.

He spells "cortile" with two "l's." Sealfon is exuberant. She spells "coterie" and must spell another word before claiming the trophy.

"Euonym," the judge says.

She smiles. She does not know this word but knows she can decipher its roots.

"Is it 'eu' meaning good?" she asks quickly. She wipes her forehead. Yes.

"Is it 'onym' meaning name?" she asks. Yes.

"Euonym!" she yells and jumps up and down.

"E-U-O-N-Y-M!" she screams, pumping her fists in the air with each letter.

Sealfon is probably the best known winner in bee history. The New York Daily News and New York Post ran her picture on the front page the next day. She was interviewed by CNN, Geraldo Rivera and Rosie O'Donnell.

Her friends at Princeton now rib her for her skill. Some of her neighbors in Holder Hall have downloaded the video of her winning the bee as their screen-saver.

Though she waited a while to tell them, members of her Outdoor Action trip had their suspicions that a spelling bee champion camped among them.

"The group discovered that she was the spelling bee champ on the second to last night of OA," said Lauren Turner '04, one of her leaders. "My co-leader and I had figured it out very early in the trip and had thoughts confirmed by [the] support [team]. Two of the guys on the trip also knew that she was the spelling bee champ but didn't say anything the whole time, until the night when she came out with it.

"The night that she officially told the group, she re-inacted the spell-ing bee for us, with one of the knowing-frosh playing the spelling bee official," she said.

Sealfon was always a good speller, but she was not always this good.

"I learned how to read pretty early — at age two. So that helped," she said. But mostly, "I remembered what the words looked like . . . so I wouldn't make many spelling errors."

...The oldest of three children, Sealfon was home-schooled by her mother until ninth grade. She was introduced to spelling bees in fifth grade when a local bank invited the children of its patrons to participate in a bee.

...She won the bee for her branch, then for her district and finally for New York City. That's when she became serious about spelling and began to look for other bees. She heard about the Scripps-Howard program and entered the district competition. When she was 12, she won her district and the city, securing a place at the national bee. She came home a finalist but not a winner.

The next year she was determined to return prepared. Her parents ordered words lists from past bees, and Sealfon started studying. That year she would spend 10 to 15 hours per week on her spelling.

Although each day was structured differently, Sealfon followed a rigorous schedule:

Morning began anywhere from 5 to 7:30 a.m. She practiced spelling, read thousands of words repeatedly and was quizzed by her parents. Every half-hour, she took 10-minute breaks to sleep. The cycle continued until 10 a.m.

After breakfast, she read a history textbook for about two hours, often taking respites to walk around and think about the topic. During lunch, she discussed the topic with her mother. Next was math for an hour, or at least until the mail came.

Sealfon thinks back:

"Then say the mail comes. I look at it and I get two letters. One is from someone from Chicago that I knew in the spelling bee because I was corresponding with those people . . . and one is from a pen pal that I just had as a pen pal . . . And I also say got Cricket magazine, which is a children's literary magazine. We still get it. That's still subscribed to me, but it is for my brother.

"After lunch, I'd be reading the letters. Then I'd put the letters up to write a letter. Then I would take a break and read Cricket magazine. And then I'd read a book — what books was I reading then?"

She presses her fingertips against her cheeks, pulls her fingers through her hair, slaps her palms on the table. It's as if she is trying to spell a word.

Spelling is important to Sealfon. She insists she was never caught with a spelling error throughout high school. "Including typos," she says.

Ironically, however, the spelling bee champion stood face-to-face with a mistake one of her first days at Princeton. Not hers, but Princeton's.

She had been accepted into a creative writing course — well at least Rebecca S-E-A-L-F-A-N was.

But the error did not gibe her. "What the thing means is more important than whether they spell it right," she said.

Still, Sealfon carries the letters of the alphabet like steel plates in her socks, and often misspellings jar her. She tries not to let them sufflaminate her though, that is to retard the motion of, to stop, to impede.

Either way, it will always be: "S-U-F-F-L-A-M-I-N-A-T-E!"