SABRATON – They got into a war of words Wednesday in Monongalia County Schools – but it wasn’t a bad thing.
In fact, academically speaking, it was a good thing.
Lexicon-warriors from across the district, along with their counterparts from St. Francis de Sales and Covenant Christian, assembled in the district’s central offices in Sabraton to do word-battle.
The occasion was the 2026 Monongalia County Schools Spelling Bee and the field included some familiar faces.
Namely, Nirav Nimbarte, an eighth-grader from Mountaineer Middle who burned the field with his spelling of “incinerate” to take the top trophy.
He did the same last year with a finish that took him to regional competition, where he again bested the field in a performance that punched his ticket to the national Bee in Washington, D.C., that spring.
There were no breakdowns for Josie Lemley of Clay-Battelle who successfully sounded out “dissolution” for her trophy.
In the elementary school competition, Maximus Grammar, the kid with the spelling bee name, represented Skyview Elementary with the correct rendering of “emissary” before the judges.
The latter of which, standing before judges, to pull a word out of your brain, never failed to enthrall the late Joe Paull, an educator and official bee pronouncer for years at spelling events across north-central West Virginia.
“Think about that,” he’d say. “No spellchecker or auto-correct. Just you.”
Just you and about 1 million words, actually.
That’s how many there are – give or take – in the English dictionary, drawing from Latin, Old English, French, German and even Yiddish.
Which, for him, is what makes the spelling bee such an educational endeavor.
There’s the etymology, history, anthropology and sociology of it all, he’d continue. Spelling bee words, he said, spark reading fluency, critical thinking and interests in fields that were previously unfamiliar.
“You aren’t just ‘memorizing.’ You’re learning.”
