Walnut Hills High School 2021 Vocabulary Bowl State Champs

Press release from Cincinnati Public Schools:

May 27, 2021

For the third consecutive year, Walnut Hills High School can't be beat when it comes to vocabulary. They know the definition of 267,055 words, garnering the title of 2020-2021 Vocabulary Bowl state champions. They took second place nationally.

The Vocabulary Bowl is a national online word-learning competition sponsored by Vocabulary.com The school that masters the most words between October 1 and April 30 wins the Vocabulary Bowl. Mastery of a word means students have selected the correct definition of a word from the list.

Seventh-grader Rhys Wise took top honors as the Walnut student mastering the most words with 16,821. Rezvan Ghezae took second place with 11,057 words and Adam Su came in third with 10,527.

"They're learning words on their computers, their phones, their tablets, at home, on the bus, during lunch and free periods and vocabulary-binge sessions in English class," said Dawn Wolfe, AP English and composition teacher.

All Walnut Hills students participate in the Vocabulary Bowl since it is integrated into the English curriculum, Wolfe said. "This is an interactive way to teach vocabulary and it is expanding beyond English. Other teachers are finding Vocabulary.com useful. A science teacher, for example, may ask students to use the online tool to understand the meaning of new science terms."

Fast Facts about the 2020-2021 Vocabulary Bowl:

• Total students participating: 1,300,000+ million students
• Total schools participating: 43,500+
• Total words mastered: 36,600,000+
• K-12 students from 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories and 9 Canadian provinces participated
• Students earn points for their school by mastering words on Vocabulary.com

See the full results of this season's Vocabulary Bowl here.

Watch a story about Walnut Hills' win on Fox19.com.

This press release was produced by Cincinnati Public Schools. The views expressed here are the author’s own.