Dan, it's limited to kids because it's intended less as an open sporting competition and more of an academic/extracurricular pursuit -- i.e., you don't allow adults for the same reasons you don't allow adults in high-school debate or track or whatever. I assume the cap is partly traditional -- spelling bees are for younger kids, really, not a high-school pursuit -- but mostly because the hardcore kids put in a lot of time, in a way you wouldn't want to ask of high-school kids, who could be spending their time on much better, less-specific things. Middle school is probably the most appropriate time for someone to get all into spelling bees.
As for foreign words my understanding was always that they didn't use anything that has significant variation in its English transliteration -- were there really some that broke that rule? Normally all loan words, no matter how obscure, are either from languages that share our alphabet or have pretty definite English spellings.
― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 28 December 2006 17:33 (seventeen years ago) link
― Joe Isuzu's Petals (Rock Hardy), Thursday, 28 December 2006 17:43 (seventeen years ago) link
How do they justify the Persian New Year?
― dan selzer (dan selzer), Thursday, 28 December 2006 17:46 (seventeen years ago) link
― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 28 December 2006 17:53 (seventeen years ago) link
So any word that appears in an English text and can be verified against the master dictionary there is fair game -- you'd just need to be the kind of middle-school kid who happens to know how Merriam-Webster likes to transliterate Farsi.
― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 28 December 2006 17:58 (seventeen years ago) link
― aimurchie (aimurchie), Thursday, 28 December 2006 19:41 (seventeen years ago) link
― jo ga11ucci electrix (joseph), Friday, 29 December 2006 00:51 (seventeen years ago) link
― dan selzer (dan selzer), Friday, 29 December 2006 02:05 (seventeen years ago) link
― ken c (ken c), Friday, 29 December 2006 02:28 (seventeen years ago) link
"is what euonym good"? "As um euonyming name"???
wtf did she say???
― ken c (ken c), Friday, 29 December 2006 02:31 (seventeen years ago) link
illicium, man that was a tough one 😕
― tehresa, Friday, 27 May 2016 00:47 (seven years ago) link
"The dreaded schwa claims another."
― tehresa, Friday, 27 May 2016 02:04 (seven years ago) link