The winning word for the 95th Scripps Spelling Bee, correctly spelled by eighth-grade student Dev Shah, was psammophile.
The shifty nature of English spelling is such that more eighth-graders would probably, on hearing it, spell it samafile. But English spelling wants to hurt you and we all know it. If I said this word and then presented both spellings you would probably all assume that psammophile must be the correct one. For that matter, if I also presented tsambeauphiall quite a few people would likely go for that one, just because it’s even weirder. Once you have been to the beach of English spelling, where the tides of time batter against the lexical grains, you’re always going to have a bit of it in your shoes and a bit more in your shorts and plenty more on the floor of your home.
Not that beaches are bad. Many people like them. My wife loves being on the beach. Sand may be nature’s glitter bomb, but there is something so very relaxing about being on the soft sand on a warm sunny day by the lake or ocean (and, if you’re my wife, going swimming too). You could say she’s a psammophile.
Technically, psammophile refers specifically to plants and animals (and bugs too) that prefer to live in sand. But the roots are simple enough: ψάμμος psammos ‘sand’ (and, by the way, you can say the “p” in it if you really want, but for most of us it goes against the grain) and φίλος filos ‘beloved, loving’ (the ph is the standard Latin transliteration; apparently the Greek φ was in the earlier times more like “p” plus “h” and not the same as f, for which Latin of course had a letter).
Another English word for the same, also confected from classical roots, is arenophile, using Latin arena ‘sand’ for the first part, but it has two issues: (1) it mixes Latin and Greek (not really illegal, let me tell you) and (2) arena has shifted meaning in English, so the word seems to refer to a space for engaging in certain kinds of sports and rock concerts.
There are a few other English words that also start with psamm-, such as psammology (study of sand), psammophobic (afraid of sand, or at least avoiding sand), psammoxenic (unable to survive in sand), psammon (the community of organisms living in sand, which by the way does not include salmon), and psammotherapy – which specifically intends therapy in sand baths, but when I see people stretched out on the beach, I am inclined to extend the meaning.
But there are some other words I haven’t found in the dictionary but think are worth adding: psammba, a dance on the beach; psammple, just a little bit of the beach that somehow got into your luggage; and psammwich, which you will, alas, immediately know if you have ever taken a sandwich to the beach.
Sesquiotica 