Of course you can. But the words thrown at contestants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee are never that easy. In fact, to get to the final competition in Washington, D.C., you have to work your way up the ladder through a bevy of local spelling bees.

The first National Spelling Bee was sponsored by The Louisville Courier-Journal in 1925 and featured nine contestants who’d excelled in local competitions. (Frank Neuhauser of Louisville took home the top prize that year by spelling “gladiolus.”) Of the winners to date, 42 have been girls and 38 were boys. Besides being a whiz with the dictionary, the other provisos for participation are that a contestant must be under age 16 and must not yet have completed the eighth grade.

The Scripps Spelling Bee features predominantly American participants, with a smattering of contestants from Jamaica, the Bahamas, New Zealand, and Canada. Spelling bees in general are pretty much an American/British tradition, mainly because many other languages (Spanish, for example) have this peculiarity where every letter is always pronounced the same, so words are spelled just like they sound. That sort of takes the challenge out of the whole thing.