By Robert Oliphant

How grand to have a reading-friendly alternative to our long running Scripps National Spelling Bee.Starting October 27 and sponsored by GSN, the Game Show Network, American youngsters will have ten successive opportunities to register online at www.winwithwords.com as participants in a 3-level vocabulary championship competition: city, region, and national.Right now plenty of orientation materials are available online, enough so to indicate that the contest can fairly be described as a major step forward, especially for Americans concerned with high speed reading comprehension.

Let's take a look at some of the target words on the NVC web site, namely, ABSTRACT, AESTHETIC, ALLEVIATE, and AMBIVALENT.As far as frequency of use goes, these four words are less familiar to us than early friends like RUN, JUMP, DOG, CAT, and HAT.But they're certainly mainstream items we're bound to encounter in the daily newspaper, on television, and in the books we read.

A Latino-Germanic vocabulary. . . . Even more important, they're all immigrants to English, most of them borrowed from 17th century Latin and Graeco-Latin.This means that, just like exotic cookery, these immigrant words are composed of strange ingredients.What's an AB-, for example, or a –TRACT, or those two guys named –LEVIATE and –VALENT?It also means that since 80% of the words in a standard desk dictionary like Webster's New World are Latinate borrowings like these, the language we speak every day should really be called Latino-Germanic, not "English" or even American English

Hard to learn and easy to forget — it's not surprising that Latino-Germanic vocabulary power opens many, many career doors in our society, especially advanced degree programs like the PhD, MBA, JD, and MD.Nor should it be surprising that the NVC is closely linked to the Princeton Review and other organizations designed to help Americans to meet formal examination challenges like the SAT, the ACT, and pre-professional ordeals like the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT

So we should all be grateful to the NVC for reminding us that vocabulary growth, mainstream or technological, is a lifelong process that deserves far more attention than it now gets in our K-12 system, including revisions in next year's NVC and thereafter.By way of getting the revision process started, here are some points for the NVC to think about, along with parents and teachers concerned with the role of vocabulary power in the reading process.

Dictionary authority. . . . The Scripps National Spelling Bee explicitly cites Webster's Unabridged Third International Dictionary (600,000 word-entries) as the source of its target words, their definitions, and even their pronunciation.This means that members of an audience — local, regional, or national — can check for themselves the accuracy of any right-or-wrong decision made regarding a specific answer.

In contrast, this year's NVC does NOT list a specific, traceable authority for its answers.Nor can many of the answers on its web site be found in a family-size dictionary like Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3rd edition (WNW). Under "Sample Questions," for example, the NVC web site offers "lush" (not listed in WNE) as an answer-synonym for LUXURIOUS and the etymology "originally meaning cup or platter" for "grail" (actually capitalized by WNW as the proper noun Grail, as in Holy Grail)

This is not to say that NVC is out of line in basing the correctness of its answers upon inhouse consensus (SAT does it too) rather than upon a public record source which can be easily checked by potential participants.But apart from its authority, a family dictionary is a splendid study tool, enough so the future versions of the NVC should really give serious thought to encouraging dictionary use by potential contestants.

Word frequency. . . . The Scripps National Spelling Bee concentrates on the virtuoso spelling of rare, exotic, low-frequency words, as indicated by the fact that nearly all of them, e.g. MYOCARDIAL, have only one or two definitions listed for them in WNW — as opposed to very frequently used words like RUN, which has over 100 separate numbered definitions that take two solid columns.The more meanings listed, the more frequently a word is used — this feature, once recognized, makes any dictionary a practically accessible word-frequency resource that's more linguistically reliable than either the Global English list or the British National Corpus, both of which massage their items quite a bit.

As a reading-friendly test, NVC wisely focuses upon mid frequency words (5 to 15 definitions) that American youngsters are far more likely to encounter in their daily newspaper, including its crossword puzzles.This language-at-work emphasis of NVC represents a giant step forward that will encourage all, Americans, young and old, to strengthen their basic vocabulary power, measurably so when it comes to high stakes college admissions and pre-professional entry tests.

Multiple-meaning reading and social-awareness skills. . . . The NVC could in time represent a very practical response to America's growing concern with multiple-meaning reading comprehension, including being able to recognize which of several possible meanings for TRIBE best fits its use in a specific phrase ("you and your tribe") used by John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams (a recent Florida Comprehension Assessment Test item.In this connection it's worth noting that Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, explicitly announces its coverage of 225,000 definitions (averaging out to about 4.5 definitions (a lexicographer's term for "meaning") for each ordinary word).

Unfortunately, judging from its website, the NVC right now still subscribes to the single-word single-meaning fallacy, thereby obscuring the multiple meaning richness of the American vocabulary.Multiple meaning puns for children, figures of speech in literature, discourse awareness for senior citizens — these come far closer to defining both vocabulary power and social civility than holds true for the mastery of single-meaning professional sesquipedalia

By way of illustration:Both the VA Administration hospitals and Kaiser Permanente HMO have long used for diagnostic purposes "psychological" questions calling for the interpretation of proverbs like "Two heads are better than one" as measuring a patient's presumed contact with social reality.From a testing perspective the question simply calls for making a choice between two dictionary definitions (in WNW for HEAD: #1 "the top part of the body" and #3 "a symbol for the individual person."Given our Alzheimer's problem, let's hope that future versions of the NVC will focus more upon the importance of multiple-meaning awareness, as represented in our family dictionaries.

Crossword-style question format. . . . The strength of the Scripps National Spelling Bee lies in its focus upon a single right-or-wrong one-word answer, paralleling games like Jeopardy and even the American crossword puzzle.For the test taker, this format invites a lot of preliminary concentration before a final answer takes shape in the mind; call it creative guessing if you will.

Just as important, this kind of one-word answer test is far cheaper to construct and use than most professionally designed vocabulary tests, especially those which employ "foils," as with "hand is to finger as foot is to. . . . (a) ankle, (b) instep, (c) sole, (d) toe."

The accompanying appendix describes crossword-style vocabulary testing and its potential benefits, enough so that I hope that, along with the NVC and its well deserved success, it will lead more emphasis upon multiple-meaning vocabulary power in the form of what might be called a "Reading Friendly National Vocabulary Test."

TO CONCLUDE. . . . As sponsored by GSN, the National Vocabulary Championship is getting plenty of attention, paralleling that received by the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the National Anthem Project, and the Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest.To me, developments like these signal a grass roots return to our national center, namely, the cumbersome world language that we learn to speak as children and find ourselves forgetting as we move into our sixties.

Sentimental English professors aside, what I've called Latino-Germanic is truly a 600,000-word monster, uniquely so on this planet by virtue of its size (twice that of French or German) and indiscriminate borrowings over the years.But as I see it, these two features are what make Latino-Germanic uniquely appropriate for a multi-cultural nation like ours.

Simply put, learning English is almost as hard for native speakers as it is for non-native speakers.More than any other language on the planet, it's an equal-opportunity challenge, as eloquently instanced by the marvelous literature produced over the years by non-native speakers. Joseph Conrad, V.S. Naipaul, R.G. Narayan, Billy Wilder, Vikram Seth, Amy Tan — the list could go on and on, each of them uniquely different, very much like the faces in a standard sized classroom.

Since learning (and remembering) Latino-Germanic is for all of us a life time job, I feel we're greatly indebted to the National Vocabulary Championship for getting us started in the right direction.Here's hoping we all stay on the track together, productively so..

APPENDIX. . . . A Crossword-Style Reading-Friendly National Vocabulary Test

Dear Participant. . . . This Reading-Friendly National Vocabulary Test is primarily designed to give you a personal-best tool for increasing your vocabulary power, especially in connection with strengthening your ability to read quickly, retentively, and with full comprehension.As in indicated by national tests like the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), much of this ability involves your skill in recognizing which dictionary meaning of a word best fits its use in a specific sentence.

Consequently, since it's our frequently used words that have the most meanings, not obscure tongue-twisters like Supercalifragilistiexpealidocious, this is truly a "national" everyday vocabulary test, not a challenge for a small group of precocious spellers.

What follows are examples of our three main question types.These questions all have a crossword-style format, which is to say that they each give you a number-of-letters clue, as with "7L for the target word COLLEGE, followed by a partial-spelling abbreviation, "col****."Following this, just like a crossword puzzle, is a definition selected from the definitions listed for that specific word in Webster's New World College Dictionary, 3rd edition (WNW), e.g., "an institution of higher education that grants degrees."The question-format then closes with the number location of the definition in its WNW entry and the total number of definitions in that entry.Our COLLEGE question, for example, would close with[3,6] as an indication that the definition quoted is the third definition in a sequence of 6 definitions.

Number of letters, a spelling clue, a selected definition, and a definition address — these are our basic question-format elements.Here's how they work with three different kinds of questions (answers appear in braces at the end of each question).

1) SPELLING CLUE QUESTIONS (Note that the number of clue-letters can be varied). . . .

1a). . . . 7L....fed****.... supporting the US government in the Civil War.... [4,7].... {FEDERAL}.

1b). . . .6L....hand**....a person's name, nickname, or title.... [4,6].... {HANDLE}.

2) PRONUNCIATION-CLUE QUESTIONS. . . . The following type of question replaces our previous syllable-based spelling clues with phonetic-pronunciation clues.The system used here matches up with that of WNW, but uses the keyboard-friendly symbols used today in foreign language textbooks., e.g., kahl"ihj for COLLEGE.For test takers pronunciation clues like these are usually just as helpful as spelling clues.

2a). . . . 10L.... ih-maej-ih-nay"shuhn.... a foolish notion , empty fancy.... [3,6].... {IMAGINATION}

2b). . . . 7L.... juhr"nuhl.... the part of a rotary axle that turns the bearing.... [6,6].... {JOURNAL)

3). . . . INITIAL LETTER-CLUE QUESTIONS. . . . This is our most challenging question format, since it offers only the initial letter for each word-target, e.g., "c****** for COLLEGE.Practically considered, it works best with specific lists of target words.

3a). . . . 7L.... m*******.... to lead or guide ceremoniously.... [7,7]. . . . {MARSHALL}

3b). . . . 7L.... n******....to ignore or disregard.... [1,6].... NEGLECT

*

SPECIAL NOTE ON MULTIPLE-CHOICE ANSWER FORMAT. . . . The above questions, just like spelling bee questions, call for one-word answers.For large-scale, multiple-choice use, these one-word answers can be fairly designated by choosing a specific vowel-letter from the target word, as in the following answer-direction.

Please indicate the correct one-word answer to the above questions by designating its LAST VOWEL LETTER EXCLUDING ANY PRESENTED IN THE CLUE, choosing from the following five options: (a) A; (b) E; (c) I; (d) O; (e) U, Y, or "none of these."If your answer for col**** "an institution of higher education that grants degrees" is COLLEGE, your multiple-choice answer would be (b) for its final vowel E.

SPECIAL NOTE ON PERSONAL BEST STUDY AND DO IT YOURSELF TESTING.Despite folk sayings about "swallowing the dictionary," there's too much there for any of us to read it straight through and make sense out of it.But we can create our own smaller word-frequency group based upon the number of definitions listed for their members, as in a 7-meaning group or a 6-meaning group or a 6-7 meaning group chosen randomly, as in the above illustrative examples.

We can also limit the range of our search by restricting the number of pages, e.g., "all the 5-meaning words contained in pages 1-100 of WNW."Strange meanings for familiar words — that's what your search will unearth, and that's exactly the way many authors use them.If you want to increase your reading speed (600 words per minute is a good target) without sacrificing comprehension and retentiveness, multiple-meaning vocabulary power can be a very helpful partner — day after day after day.