The OED is doing a spelling test, you can take it in both English and American and it has three difficulty settings.

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/media/spelling-bee-2011/

I have aced tricky and difficult, but can't get more than 11/15 for fiendish.

11/15 on 'Fiendish'. Doesn't help having those saying the words having speech defects. Who the hell talks like that in real life. Tried three times, 11/15 each time.

The speech is from the onsite (and also on cd) pronunciations of each word. I made the 'flibbertigibbet-slubberdegullion' rap with two of those files...I say rap, it's mainly elements of flibbertigibbet and slubberdegullion.

Tricky 6/15
Difficult 3/15
Fiendish 0/15

Aced the first 2, couldn't get past 14/15 on Fiendish - sometimes through mishearing, sometimes through mistyping, sometimes through misspelling - then it ran out of words!

Tricky 15-15
Difficult 8-15
Fiendish 4-15

tricky-14/15 (missed the first word, never heard of it)
difficult- 9/15
fiendish-7/15

Yeah public school education!!

This is really fun, thanks for posting!

I aced it on every level the first time through, but I've been sitting here playing over and over on "fiendish" and I do miss one every now and again.

I agree the audio clips are a bit unclear at times... I had to replay "yacht" about four times before I could understand it. And I heard "harangue" as "meringue"... 


EDIT: The ones I get wrong seem to mostly be Italian food related words I'm unfamiliar with... though I've managed to guess a few.

This is a stupid test. Since definitions are not provided, I can't tell the difference between dissent and descent, idle and idol, or even lavatory and laboratory (replaying didn't help). So I have problems at the lower levels, but the fiendish level gives me no trouble because the words are unusual and don't tend to have synonyms or near-synonyms.

Oh, and Neanderthal has two acceptable spellings. I spelled it the way they wanted it, but I wonder if they would have accepted the other version?

Fun quiz. Fiendish was really hard.  

Tricky 15/15
Difficult 15/15
Fiendish 8/15

fiendish- 1/15, i did good on the other 2 though

I'm with Arch, it's really hard to understand what the person is saying sometimes.   For a few of them I couldn't understand what they were saying after 10-15 replays, even though it turned out I knew the word when I was reviewing the results.

Tricky 15/15
Difficult 15/15
Fiendish 14/15 at best, usually 12-13

got 2/7 right on fiendish and then it froze on me O.o

...This game cheats! They can't even pronounce the words right! Not to mention some of the words they ask aren't even in English!

*throws computer out window*