Williamson County Teen Competes in Scripps National Spelling Bee

When Marian Jenkins earned a spot at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, her friends quickly searched her name to find the start of her online footprint. 

“Out of all the things it could be to have a footprint for, I mean, that's not too bad,” the Woodland Middle School eighth grader tells Williamson Scene. 

Over the weekend, Jenkins competed for the first and last time, with her trip to Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Tennessee Titans. She’ll be a freshman at Ravenwood High School in the fall, and the bee only admits competitors up to 15 years old. 

Jenkins says she feels lucky to have advanced to the national competition and had a great experience there, ultimately placing 79th out of 250 competitors. To prepare for the bee, she was given 4,000 words to memorize, including 3,000 vocabulary words to know the definition and 1,000 challenging spelling words.

She focused on learning stem words and rules based on word origins so she can piece together words she’s not familiar with. Cinematheque, an archive of films and film-related objects, was the word that eliminated her from the national competition. 

It was French, so it has that tricky “theque,” she says. 

Another word Jenkins will always remember is the one that qualified her for nationals — singultus, the medical word for hiccup. Once at nationals, coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns got her past the first round. Her random vocabulary word was merciful, she says, “apprehensive.”

“I was just putting in my best effort in every step of the way to try to do my best, so even if I don't win, I can still be proud of the work I put in,” Jenkins says. “It taught me a few important lessons about life, like if you really want something, there's a lot of other people who probably want it too.” 

There aren’t other spelling virtuosos in her family that she knows of, but she does say her family is “pretty nerdy in general.” Her mom was her coach of sorts, helping to prepare her for the competition and set up a spreadsheet for study. 

Spelling bee competitors warned her she’d be “stung by the bee” and want to come back to coach younger kids. But Jenkins has other interests, like playing violin, and she is eyeing a career in medicine. The medical terms she had to learn for the bee would pay off, but she’s not planning to continue in spelling specifically. 

“I think spelling is really cool, but I think I'll just use my skills to do well on standardized tests in high school and stuff like that.” she says.  

A lot of the other competitors knew each other from previous years, she observed, and a lot of them have a private tutor and prepare year round. Unlike many of the other kids and tweens she met at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, she hadn’t been preparing her whole life for that moment. That fact played in her favor. 

“I feel like a lot of the kids took it really seriously,” she says. “They were like beating themselves up when they got out,” “You're just spelling the words out of the dictionary. It's not really that serious.” 

Jenkins has a remarkable amount of perspective, which she employed on the national stage. 

“This is really important to me right now," she says. "But for the future, it's a really short time commitment in the grand scheme of things. If I get out of the spelling bee, it's not like my whole life is over, because I didn't spend my whole life only worrying about spelling.”