Yale students dressed as bees, adults costumed as witches and anthropomorphic cats competed in an adult Spelling Bee fundraiser days before Halloween. 

New Haven Reads hosted its 12th annual Spelling Bee on Friday, Oct. 25 at the Yale School of Management. Teams of three — composed of Yale undergraduates, university librarians, faculty members and New Haveners — donned their most creative group costumes and battled it out over their knowledge of esoteric words.

The Spelling Bee is New Haven Reads’ primary fundraising event. Each year, proceeds support the organization’s free tutoring programs and Book Bank, a free repository of books for local students. This year, roughly 150 people attended the competition. 

“It’s an opportunity for us both to raise money for our programs, but also to engage with the community in a fun way,” said Fiona Bradford, the development and communications director at New Haven Reads. “It’s an opportunity to share a little bit about our mission with people who may not come directly through our doors.”

The 29 participating teams competed in five rounds, called “swarms,” spelling words of increasing difficulty to advance to the event finals. The winning team, AdjectHive, featured students in Yale’s Linguistics Department and was captained by Jem Burch ’25. This year marks their second consecutive victory.

This year’s bee brought in roughly $25,000 to support local literacy efforts, according to Bradford. Most of the proceeds came from community sponsors, such as the Yale Center for British Art, Claire’s Corner Copia and Yale New Haven Health. Each sponsor was given the opportunity to send a team of their choice to compete in the Spelling Bee.

“You have to love a community that decides that at seven o’clock on a Friday night they want to go to a Spelling Bee,” said Barbara Rockenbach, a university librarian. “That speaks volumes about this community.”

For the second year, Rockenbach served as the Spelling Bee’s “word guru,” which entails learning and pronouncing each of the competition’s words. The Spelling Bee’s word list this year featured the word “glycosaminoglycan,” and past years’ winning words include “stromuhr,” “numnah,” “skeuomorph” and “piblokto.” 

Each team was allowed twenty seconds to work together and write the correct spelling of each word on a whiteboard. Between “swarms,” children descended upon the stage to participate in interactive games. 

Spelling bee leaders said the event showcased the vast local coalition that backs New Haven Reads’ work.

“It was a great cosmopolitan canopy that united people in common purpose, which is a wonderful thing,” said Michael Morand, director of community engagement at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and emcee for this year’s Spelling Bee. “New Haven is a quilt of many colors, and it is great to see how all the patches come together to support literacy.”

The Spelling Bee is one of many partnerships between Yale and New Haven Reads. Yale owns and pays for New Haven Reads’ building on Bristol Street, and numerous Yale students and faculty volunteer as literacy tutors with the organization. Students also volunteered to help set up for this year’s Spelling Bee.

Before the competition began, attendees viewed a presentation describing New Haven Reads’ work, and outreach staff circulated to provide information, all with the purpose of inspiring attendees to get involved with the organization.

“What we ask people to do is to spread the word about us,” Bradford said. “We want people to have a positive impression and for their interest hopefully to be piqued, and [for them] to think, ‘Oh, I’d like to find out more about New Haven Reads and what they do.’” 

New Haven Reads hosted its first Spelling Bee in 2012.