The Official Final Jeopardy Spelling Rules [UPDATED]

I noticed I was getting a bump in search engine traffic for people who were looking for the spelling rules to Final Jeopardy. No doubt, this is in part because there was a small bit about the incident on The Today Show this morning. When I wrote about some of the implications for whether they should have given the contestant the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t include the official final jeopardy spelling rules. At the time, I was merely reflecting in hypothetical, but with people searching for the official rules, it made me wonder just what they rules said about spelling in Final Jeopardy.

If you know me, you know that I’m really good at finding things on the Internet. After doing a couple of cursory google searches (Final Jeopardy Rules, Official Final Jeopardy Rules, Official Jeopardy Rules), I was surprised that I couldn’t find them. Sometimes, the site that hosts a document like this doesn’t do a good job of using keywords. So, I thought I’d poke around the official Jeopardy site — nothing.

After some more derivations of “Rules of Jeopardy,” I was beginning to think that maybe the rules aren’t online. I thought that maybe the contestants were handed a paper copy that they signed before going on the show and that document wasn’t online. Having never been a contestant on Jeopardy (though I’d like to be some time!) I couldn’t confirm whether this was true. However, given that it’s a game show, I’m sure they signed something before going on the show. Regardless, I didn’t have access to that document.

When I was poking around the Jeopardy site, I noticed there was a message board for Jeopardy. While not an official source, I thought that there might be some discussion of what had happened on the show last week (EmancipTation Proclamation) in the context of the rules. After reading through some of the messages on the thread talking about it, I realized that it could take a while. Before reading through that thread, I noticed a different thread that was directing everyone to the 22-page thread talking about what happened because it had “several clear explanations” as to why the judges had to rule the way that they did.

After reading the 22-page thread — the majority of which were people who registered for the forum simply to complain about the ruling — there were some interesting anecdotes. For instance, did you know that this misspelling incident has happened on Final Jeopardy in the past? In an episode that aired on June 6, 2007, there was a clue that was looking for the response: “Sargasso Sea.” The person in the lead (going into Final Jeopardy), however, misspelled his response. He wrote, “SarAgasso Sea.” As you can see in the video below, the judges ruled the same way they did for EmancipTation:

As this really didn’t answer my question about the “official rules,” I thought I’d do a Site Search of the message board to see if I could find the rules. I used some of those keywords from earlier and like before, didn’t find anything official. Although, this was an interesting entry [Emphasis Added]:

I have no official source for this, but from what I’ve heard from various people over the years, there is no official written set of rules that the judges are required to abide by. It has been mentioned that this could be done for liability purposes, because if the judges were to make a ruling that went against their written rules, a player could potentially sue them, or something like that. I believe that in the contestant paperwork, all players must sign something agreeing that all judges’ decisions are final. There may be some general guidelines for acceptable responses in this paperwork, but they probably don’t cover all possible scenarios, and the judges’ decision will always be final. While they do have appeal processes, and I presume that they work to the best of their ability to ensure that no contestant is treated unfairly, I’m sure there have been instances of players leaving the show feeling that they were in some way treated unfairly due to an unfortunate judges ruling either against them, or in favor of a competing player.

There are a lot of little rules of thumb that longtime viewers of the show have been able to piece together over the years, and most times the show’s rulings seem pretty consistent with past precedents. It is generally accepted that leading articles can be omitted and still be ruled correct, as in “Grapes of Wrath” or “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. However, incorrect or missing articles within a title will lead to an incorrect ruling, such as “One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Gone With Wind”. Those may be poor examples, but I can’t really think of any good ones at the moment.

As to Veteran Affairs or Veterans Affairs, I think it is usually the case that when dealing with something that has an official title, the wording must be exact, and in many cases the inclusion or exclusion of something as small as an “s” could indeed lead to an incorrect ruling.

As to the consonant/vowel distinction, the general rule is that when giving a response verbally, you don’t have to pronounce it correctly, but you must at least give something that could be a possible phonetic pronunciation of the correct spelling. Generally this means that you could change vowel sounds, but you need to use the correct consonants, otherwise what you’ve said does not appear to be the same word as the intended correct response. Without examples in front of me this is hard to explain. It often comes up in cases of foreign words, or names of famous people that someone has seen in writing many times, but rarely has heard spoken aloud.

In Final Jeopardy, the rules are similar, but the opposite is true. While your spelling can be incorrect, what you have spelled should be possible to pronounce in the same way as the intended correct response. Normally if you change a consonant, something is not going to be pronounced the same way, while changing vowels could still lead to similar pronunciation. One recent exception to this rule was when Franz Liszt was the correct FJ response, and one contestant responded with “Who is Lizt”. While she was missing a vowel, the “s” and “z” sounds in Liszt sort of blend together, so the judges likely decided that “Lizt” or “Lizst” would be accepted. I don’t know if they would have accepted “List”. They may also have accepted something like “Lieszt” or “Leeszt”, as there is probably a lot of wiggle room in dealing with vowel sounds of foreign names like this.

While to my knowledge there is no list compiled on the web of all Jeopardy! ruling precedents, there are plenty of diehard fans of the show, and many seem to have near-photographic memories of these kinds of things, so you should always feel free to ask any ruling questions on this board or at the jboard. It has been my experience that Jeopardy! fans are always more than willing to help.

We can apply some of what this commenter said to the two examples. Adding the ‘T’ to Emancipation does change the pronunciation. Similarly, the ‘A’ in Sargasso does change the pronunciation. I know that this probably won’t satisfy many people who think that the contestant should have been given the benefit of the doubt, but I hope this will shed a little more light on the process (at least perceived) that judges use to make rulings on spelling in Final Jeopardy.

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So, maybe what this commenter is saying is true — maybe there aren’t any official rules. If there are official rules, they’re not readily available on the Internet. I can imagine that with what’s happened over the last week, some journalist/reporter would have likely emailed the producers of Jeopardy to ask about the official rules and I haven’t seen any articles recently about official rules. For now, I suppose this comment from a message board will have to suffice.

UPDATE: Remember Ken Jennings? Probably the most prolific Jeopardy player — ever. I came across something that Jennings said about what happened last week with EmancipTation. As you’ll see, it seems to be in line with what I found earlier on the message board:

Jeopardy! record-maker and Parade columnist Ken Jennings agrees that the ruling, however frustrating, was fair. “I feel bad for Thomas, of course,” he told Parade.com. “But the unwritten rule on Jeopardy! has always been that your Final Jeopardy answer doesn’t have to be spelled right, but it has to be the same phonetically as the right answer. If he’d spelled it ‘Emansipation’ or even ‘Immancipation,’ he probably would have been okay,” Jennings explained. “I once spelled Grenada as ‘Granada’ and Alex let it slide. But add a new consonant sound, like Thomas did, and that’s ball game.”