Spelling Bee Word Lists: Where to Find Them

The official spelling bee word lists come from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which updates its study lists each school year. For the 2026-2027 season, the 450-word 2027 School Spelling Bee Study List is the one to learn for classroom and school bees. The 4,000-word 2027 Words of the Champions, which includes those 450 words, is for school champions moving on to regional bees. Schools enrolled in the Scripps program receive both, and families at enrolled schools can download the school list with a free account (Scripps Study Tips; Scripps FAQ; Scripps Resource Center).

The official lists for the 2026-2027 season

List	Size	Level of bee	Who can get it
2027 School Spelling Bee Study List	450 words, from first-grade to eighth-grade words	Classroom and school bees	Teachers at enrolled schools; families at enrolled schools through the Resource Center
2027 Words of the Champions	4,000 words, including the 450 school words	School champions preparing for regional qualifiers and regional bees	Enrolled schools; also sold as a booklet
2027 Classroom and School Competition Lists	Study-list words plus extra words for the end of a bee	Used by officials to run classroom and school bees	Enrolled schools

School Spelling Bee Study List

Scripps says this 450-word list is what to study for a school spelling bee. It starts with first-grade words and gets harder up through eighth grade. Once spellers are comfortable with the words for their own grade, Scripps suggests they learn the rest of the list. If your bee has vocabulary rounds, there’s also a version with definitions and parts of speech (Scripps Study Tips).

Teachers at enrolled schools get the list along with grade-level study lists (Scripps Enrollment). Parents at enrolled schools can create a free account in the Spelling Bee Resource Center and download their child’s grade-level lists and the full School Spelling Bee Study List (Scripps Resource Center).

Words of the Champions

Words of the Champions has 4,000 words split into One Bee, Two Bee and Three Bee difficulty levels. Scripps says any word on it may be asked at competitions beyond the school level (Scripps Study Tips).

Scripps’s pages describe its purpose a little differently. The resources page says it prepares students for classroom, school, regional qualifier and regional bees, since it contains all 450 school words (Scripps Resources). The FAQ about the 2027 edition calls it the study booklet for school champions preparing for bees after the school bee (Scripps FAQ). Both say the same thing in practice: learn the 450 words for a school bee, then learn the full 4,000 if you advance.

According to that FAQ, the 2027 edition became available to enrolled schools on August 18, 2026 (same source). Scripps updates the list every year. Its study-materials FAQ said the 2027 booklet would go on sale after Labor Day (Scripps FAQ), but the paperback link on Scripps’s study-list page still points to a 2026 edition (Scripps). The FAQ is the more specific, season-dated page. If you buy a copy, check that the cover says 2027.

Competition lists

The words actually read aloud at a classroom or school bee come from separate competition lists, which Scripps gives enrolled schools for running their bees (Scripps Enrollment). Scripps recommends using only the current year’s list. For 2026-2027, that’s the 2027 School Competition List, because it draws on the current study list (Scripps FAQ). If you’re organizing a bee, our guide to running a classroom spelling bee covers the rest.

How local bees choose their words

Under the 2027 Suggested Rules for Spelling Bees, local officials choose the competition list for their own bee and are encouraged to use the right level of Scripps’s annual competition list. Those lists contain words from the current study lists, then end with a section of words that aren’t on the study lists, for use near the end of a bee if officials decide they’re needed. Every word on the annual lists is an entry in Merriam-Webster Unabridged, which is the final authority on spelling (Scripps 2027 Suggested Rules).

Scripps calls every bee other than its national competition a local bee, and local officials can adapt the suggested rules (same source). The National Competition has its own Contest Rules, and Scripps says the 2027 edition will be available in late fall 2026 (Scripps Rules). Either way, expect a bee to start with words from the study list and finish with words you haven’t studied (Scripps Study Tips).

How to turn a list into a study plan

A list of 450 or 4,000 words is much easier to handle once it’s broken into pieces.

1. Start at your level. Scripps pronouncer Dr. Jacques Bailly advises starting wherever you are and working on your level of words until you’re ready for the next (Scripps, How to Study for a Spelling Bee). On the school list, that means your own grade’s words first.
2. Count back from the bee date. Divide the words you still need into batches you can cover with time left over for review.
3. Test yourself instead of rereading. A 2013 review of ten study techniques rated practice testing and distributed practice highest. It rated rereading and highlighting low and suggested practice testing in their place (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Have someone read the words aloud, or cover the spelling, and spell each one before you check.
4. Space your reviews. Come back to words over several days and weeks. A review of 317 experiments found the best gap between study sessions grows with how long you need to remember the material (Cepeda et al., 2006).
5. Keep a list of misses. Put every word you get wrong at the top of your next session.
6. Read the words in context. Every year Scripps chooses books for its Bee’s Bookshelf list, and all 450 school-list words appear in those books (Scripps Study Tips). The 2026-2027 list has three books for each grade from first through eighth (Scripps Bee’s Bookshelf).

Our guide on how to practice for a spelling bee at home turns these steps into a daily routine.

Go beyond the list

Since bees often end with unstudied words, you’ll need more than the list. Bailly suggests learning Greek and Latin roots, such as tele- meaning “far,” which hints at how telekinesis begins, and collecting words from the same language. His example is Hawaiian words such as muumuu and aloha (Scripps, How to Study for a Spelling Bee). Our guides to Greek and Latin roots, language of origin and spelling unfamiliar words show how.