Until last weekend, it had been decades since I had taken part in a spelling bee.

But there I was in the middle of 62 kids at the 58th annual Journal Gazette Allen County Spelling Bee presented by Touchstone Energy and IPFW, listening to the familiar sound of students spelling out words, one letter at a time, and occasionally hearing a bell ring.

I wasn’t spelling, though. I was a judge, and that’s a good thing. Not only didn’t I know how to spell many of the words that came up, I didn’t know what a lot of the words even meant. Later I went back and looked some of the words up, and found that some weren’t even listed in the standard dictionary. You had to have one of those gigantic dictionaries, the kind that comes with its own stand because it is too big to pick up, if you wanted to find some of these words.

So looking back at some of the words that were tossed out in the bee, I still haven’t been able to find out what some of them mean.

I have no idea what “raita” is, or “issei,” or “cheka.”

I never knew that there was a way of treating cloth called mercerize. Thanks to the History Channel, though, I know what “quisling” means. It’s a bad guy who has betrayed his country, sort of the Norwegian equivalent of Benedict Arnold or some such thing. I just learned that last month, but Kyla Macaraig, a student at Concordia Lutheran Lower, knew how to spell it.

As the bee wore on, the number of competitors quickly dwindled, from 62 to 40, then 24 or so, then 10. The spellers made the typical mistakes that happen when you’re trying to spell out loud. They’d get a little ahead of themselves or confused about where they were in the word and inadvertently skip over a letter.

You knew they probably knew how to spell the word. They just goofed. That’s probably why students are now allowed to use their fingers to write the words invisibly on their hands.

Finally, though, the bee came down to three spellers, and it turned into a real game of chicken. Who would blink first? The three went round after round, spelling words I’d never heard of.

I didn’t have a favorite. I just remember thinking how they kept knocking off the words one after another, no one willing to give up. You start to think that it’s too bad that a couple of these spellers are going to have to lose.

Finally one speller stumbled on the spelling of some kind of German baked good I’d never heard of, even though earlier he’d correctly spelled the name of some Dutch fish stew I’d never heard of.

In the end, one student misspelled “fuselage,” and there was finally a sole survivor.

I’m sure a lot of the spellers who got eliminated walked away disappointed. If it’s any consolation, maybe they should remember that the judges didn’t even have to know how to spell. As a judge, my job was to write down exactly how each student spelled the word, a way of verifying that they got it right or wrong. There was another judge who had the correct spelling in front of them.

Just keep that in mind. If you made it to Saturday’s bee, or will be one of the contestants in the regional bee next month, feel good about yourself.

Hey, I don’t recall ever making it much past the first round in my classroom spelling bees.