How I Actually Used the Spelling Bee Study Guide 2013 and What Actually Worked
The Spelling Bee Study Guide 2013 was a pretty standard compilation put together by various educational sites and contest organizers for kids prepping for regional spelling bees. It wasn't some revolutionary resource, but it was one of the more frequently referenced free guides around that year. If you're digging it up now, you're probably trying to figure out whether it's worth your time or just hoovering up old PDFs. The guide is organized roughly by difficulty level, with word lists pulled from past National Spelling Bee dictionaries and Merriam-Webster source materials. Each entry includes the word, its phonetic pronunciation, etymology or language of origin, and a sample sentence. Some versions also include a brief definition. The formatting is basic — tables in most cases, sometimes plain lists. Nothing fancy. What most people miss when they look at it is that the real value isn't in memorizing the words in order. It's in the etymology sections. The guide does a decent job of flagging Greek, Latin, French, and Germanic roots. If you understand that the word "chthonic" comes from Greek "chthon" meaning earth, you're not spelling it wrong under pressure because you know where it came from. Same with "sesquipedalian" — the Latin root tells you it literally means "foot-and-a-half long," which makes the spelling pattern stick.
I remember running into a specific problem when my student was using the 2013 guide for his regional prep. He kept tripping on French loanwords that had been anglicized but still retained silent letters. Words like "embarrassement" (the guide listed it as "embarrassement" with a note about the French origin) would come up, and he'd drop the second 'r' because the English pronunciation didn't reflect it. The workaround was simple: I pulled a separate French-origins list and cross-referenced it with the guide entries. He spent about two weeks drilling just the French section, emphasizing silent final consonants and double-consonant patterns common in French borrowing. That cut his error rate on those words from roughly one in five to one in twenty. The guide also has a section on homophones and near-homophones, which is useful but somewhat surface-level. It lists words like "principal/principle" and "affect/effect" with basic definitions. Not enough depth for an advanced speller. If someone is working toward the national level, they'll need something more thorough on that front.
How to actually study from it
Don't read it cover to cover. That approach wastes time and creates false confidence. Pick a difficulty bracket that matches the current level your competitor is facing, then drill the words in waves. First pass: get through the whole list and mark the ones you can spell immediately. Second pass: focus only on the flagged words. Third pass: pull words from the first and second passes and mix them together randomly so there's no predictability. Timing matters. A focused session using this method — maybe 45 words in a 20-minute block — usually sticks better than a two-hour marathon where attention fades after the first hour. I've seen this hold up across multiple kids I've worked with over the years. Here's a counter-intuitive thing that caught me off guard: the 2013 guide's word frequency distribution skews slightly toward more obscure scientific and medical terminology in the upper difficulty ranges. That's actually a reflection of what the actual National Spelling Bee was emphasizing around that period. But it means if a kid is prepping for a school-level or county-level bee, a lot of those advanced words won't even appear. They're studying words like "tessitura" and "poussiere" for a contest that mostly uses "accommodate" and "separate." Know your competition level before you commit to the full guide.
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Where to find it
The original Spelling Bee Study Guide 2013 has been archived across several educational repositories. You can find it on sites like SpellingBee.com archives, various state educational department PDF libraries, and occasionally on older teacher resource pages that haven't been taken down. It's also indexed in Internet Archive snapshots from 2013–2015. The direct PDF links vary because different publishers released their own versions, so you'll want to match the version to your region's governing body if you're preparing for an official competition. If you can't track down the exact 2013 edition, the 2014 and 2015 versions are nearly identical in structure. The core word lists don't change drastically year to year since they're drawn from the same Merriam-Webster dictionaries.
Limitations and what to supplement it with
The guide has real weaknesses. The pronunciation keys are sometimes inconsistent — one entry might use IPA notation while the next uses a simplified respelling system. That inconsistency can confuse a learner who's trying to build a reliable mental model of how each word sounds. I'd recommend pairing it with Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, which has consistent audio pronunciations for every entry. Another gap: the guide doesn't cover word origins with enough rigor for competitors who want to use etymology as a primary strategy. It tells you "Greek origin" but rarely explains the morphological components. If a student wants to understand why "ph" makes an "f" sound in Greek-derived words, they're going to need supplemental material. The free online resources from the SAE (Spelling Association of Educators) and the Scripps database of past bee words fill that gap reasonably well. For advanced prep, the 2013 guide alone won't take anyone past the regional level. It's a solid foundational tool, but competitors who are serious end up building a custom word bank by pulling from at least three sources: the official Scripps past-word lists, a comprehensive dictionary like Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, and a specialized resource like David Deuchler's etymological spelling guide. The 2013 Study Guide works best as a starting point, not a destination.
