Hardly a no-brainer: Champions clinch Northampton spelling bee title with brain-busting word

NORTHAMPTON — The “Ward Three Bees” took home jars of honey and $10 gift cards to the restaurant Bueno y Sano after correctly spelling “rhombencephalon” at the 24th Northampton Education Foundation Adult Spelling Bee Wednesday night.

The Ward Three Bees team, which comprised James Pentland, Ellie Cook and Kim Goggins, competed against the co-finalist team “Apis Wilsonava” after successfully completing five stages, or “swarms,” before a semifinal round.

The crowd was audibly left in suspense in the final round, projecting “ooh!” or cheering loudly as both finalist teams misspelled “lobscouse,” a traditional Northern European stew, but correctly spelled “genetrix,” meaning a mother or female ancestor, and “Leine,” a river in Germany.

In the final round, the Ward Three Bees held up their dry-erase board correctly spelling rhombencephalon, the part of the human brain that controls vital life-support processes like breathing, heart rate and coordination of movement, while Apis Wilsonava misspelled the word, using an “a” in place of the word’s second “e.”

Pentland said the win felt “very nice, very unexpected.”

“The competition was quite fierce, and I think the teams that made it through in the first swarm did very well because they had extremely difficult words,” he said. “We were all shocked by how difficult the words were in the first swarm.”

The spelling bee, held at Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity, raises money for the Northampton Education Foundation’s (NEF) Small Grants to Educators program, which funds new teaching and learning initiatives in the Northampton Public Schools and Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School.

In the 2025-2026 school year, NEF awarded 22 grants totaling $66,772 across all grade levels and content areas. Since 1991, NEF has raised more than $1.5 million for local schools.

Organizer Megan Zinn, known as the “queen bee,” said this year’s event raised an estimated $13,000 to $15,000 for the foundation. A self-described “word nerd,” Zinn said the excitement the bee brings out in people has kept her coming back for more than a decade.

“My favorite part is the enthusiasm for it; how much everybody enjoys being here, enjoys doing the costumes, enjoys the humor up on the stage,” Zinn said. “What the people write on their whiteboards is always fantastic.”

Ward 3 City Councilor Laurie Loisel, whose campaign sponsored the Ward Three Bees, said she thought it was “really fantastic” that there was a night people could “come together and spell words.”

“I knew this team would go far,” Loisel said. “I wanted to help bring a sense of community in our ward, and I feel like this is a real community event.”

Cook and Pentland had competed in past spelling bees, having won in 2015 as members of the Daily Hampshire Gazette team. She agreed with Pentland that the first few rounds, which featured words such as “temerarious” and “ventripotent,” seemed daunting.

“I just couldn’t believe how hard the words were in the beginning,” Cook remarked. “I thought we were going to be killed, I just thought ‘we’re going to be dead.'”

The roughly 100-minute event also featured a number of subcontests, such as a costume contest won by Brian Garrard, of “The Bee Team,” who was draped from head-to-toe in a fuzzy yellow bee suit.

Students from the Northampton High School Student Union team also brought home honey and gift cards for writing the most humorous messages on their dry-erase boards after being eliminated.

The high school students wrote messages such as “pick on someone your own size,” and “We’re just larvae” on their boards, making fun of the fact that they were the youngest adult competitors.

Goggins, who had served as one of the bee’s pronouncers in years past, joked that winning the spelling bee was “like hitting the jackpot,” adding that it was “a lot of fun” for a good cause.