Well, perhaps musings re: “Laodicean”, since neither meaning of the word applies to me.
I have to congratulate 13-year-old Kavya Shivashankar for winning this, especially with an obscure word that I didn’t know the meaning of until I was into my 20s.
The word in question makes me wonder, though, about the inclusion of such a very religion-specific word in a secular contest of this kind – and whether the bee also contains words which are derived from religions other than Christianity.
While “Laodicean” has to some degree been appropriated for use in describing a certain political sentiment (or lack thereof), it is more easily found in the book of Revelations than anywhere else – excepting perhaps a work of Thomas Hardy which still uses it in its religious context.
Can anyone – pardon the pun – enlighten me as to my wonderings above?
That Other Blog, Way Over There 
The short answer appears to be yes, other words from other religions are included. Or at very least, students wanting to practice for the bee are given a list of English words from a number of different cultural backgrounds to study.
@Kristen
Fair enough, then.
I think they do it to find out how rounded the kids are. The word, “Laodicean”, is grounded in history, even though it does have a religious connotation. Knowing the background of the word, i.e., its country of origin, gives the kids a sense of the spelling. It was easy to see one of the kids struggling with a word until he found out it was French in origin. He smiled and popped out the spelling with no problem.
My congrats to Kavya Shivashankar as well. Wasn’t she on last years spelling bee?
@jammer5: she was. She’s a repeat contender.
But re: word selection… how does the process actually work? Surely there’s an approved master list. But is the contest scripted? Is there an ordered approach to presenting the words? Or is there some auto-generation at random during the contest so that there’s no risk of bias? I’m just curious. Because random assignment might mean that religious words are just happenings and not designs.