T his May, students from across the United States will gather in Washington D.C., for the 100th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee , determined to conquer a spelling system that has baffled us for centuries. They will arrive with wordlists and flash cards, sticky notes and fidget toys, and multisyllabic monstrosities like  staphylococcus  committed to memory. At a word, they’ll be able to rattle off Latin roots, Greek suffixes, silent letters, vowel shifts, olden plurals, and other lexical