Vocab VIPs

MOSES LAKE — Next time you advise a Moses Lake Christian Academy student to use their words, be careful. They might use some you don’t know. 

MLCA emerged from the fall Vocabulary Bowl with some impressive honors: first place in Washington, second place in the U.S. and Canada in the under-500-students division and fourth place in North America overall. 

“The school that beat us (in the division) had four times the number of students we did,” said English teacher Hannah Pease, who coached the Lions wordslingers to victory. 

MLCA was one of the smaller schools in the competition, Pease said. According to the Private School Review, Moses Lake Christian has a total enrollment of 198, and Pease said about 100 students in grades 6-12 competed. 

The competition was enormous, according to the website Vocabulary.com, which organizes the Vocabulary Bowl. Almost 47,000 schools, comprising 4.34 million students, spent 60 days taking online vocabulary tests, demonstrating that they could define and spell the word correctly. Scores were calculated according to the number of words mastered in this way. There were no gradations for age or grade level, either. Sixth-graders from MLCA competed directly against high school seniors from other schools. The competition began Oct. 1 and ended Saturday. 

Moses Lake Christian Academy’s score was 51,120 words mastered, according to Vocabulary.com’s leaderboard. The next-highest score in Washington state was at Alki Middle School in Vancouver, which scored 6,413. In the overall competition, the highest score was 122,255, garnered by Saint Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with an enrollment more than 10 times that of MLCA. Twenty-four MLCA students ranked in the top 200 in the world. 

Pease drilled her kids in class and assigned them vocabulary exercises in conjunction other learning as well, she said, like words that tied in with their math or with a book they were reading.  

The students also worked on the competition at home, she said. 

“Some of the other schools were exclusively doing vocabulary at school,” Pease said. They were writing papers and doing grammar and practice and all kinds of things at school and then doing this at home.” 

“Sometimes before I did the list, I would study the words, study the definitions, or I would have split screen, (with one side) so I can look up the definitions,” said sixth grader Nash Weger, who placed 36th overall. 

Pease tracked the standings on her computer and maintained a leaderboard in her classroom so students could see where they stood.  

“We had two in particular who were trying to knock each other out of first place the entire time,” she said. “Both of them mastered about 3,000 words over the last two months.” 

“I competed against Luca (Cristoloveanu),” said freshman Rebecca Wiser. “He’s in the sophomore class, and he actually made a bet with me earlier last week, and he told me that he would beat me for November. But I showed him. I destroyed him. Yeah, he was so confident when it started.” 

Estimates of the number of words in the English language vary between about 500,000 and one million. Most of those aren’t in common use, of course; there are lots of specialized scientific and technical terms most people will never need to know. Even so, the difficult words weren’t always the most obscure ones, Weger said. 

“A lot of it was the words you’d expect to be easy,” she said. “(They) really simplified the definitions to a point where it almost seemed like the word meant something different … and then also the phobias. I already knew about arachnophobia, but there were quite a few others that took me forever.” 

The MLCA students get to retain their bragging rights until the next competition, which starts in February. They’ll also have a little more tangible reward, Pease said. 

“We will get a trophy, a plaque, for being No. 1 in Washington, and then all of my top 200 students are going to get an individual trophy as well,” she said. 

MLCA Vocab VIPs 

These students ranked in the top 200 in the world out of over 4 million students: 

Luca Cristoloveanu  
Rebecca Wiser
Clarissa Shopbell
Zoey Ferguson
Elizabeth Robertson
Nash Weger
Liana Spike
Emma Collins
Oliver Tadema
Kaitlyn Allen
Josey Sinchuk
Brie Seiler
Ella Jacobsen
Kady McCrae
Kinlee Hamilton
Q'Tyyr'N Gessner
Mattie Whitaker
Faythe Collins
Kaylie Schmidt
Maisy Herrin
Brendon Boswell
SanTahna Ferguson
Rachel Hirz
Avalyn Bishop 

    From left: Max Gerber, Oliver Tadema, Nash Weger and Josiah Stuart start honing their skills for the next Vocabulary Bowl, which starts in February.