Jacques Bailly, the bee pronouncer, has a few tricks to make sure every word is pronounced correctly.

In the days leading up to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, participants made sure they knew their phonemes and root words. They weren’t the only ones.

On Sunday, Jacques A. Bailly gathered with the bee’s other speakers, along with the vocabulary team, in what he described as an “all word geek hands on deck” to go through the entire list of words and practice using say it out loud.

“We all listen and make sure all T’s are dotted and I’s crossed, or vice versa,” he said.

Mr. Bailly won the bee in 1980 at the age of 14, and has been pronouncing words for the contest since 2003. His interest in spelling dates back to first grade, when he learned to read using sounds, probing each consonant, symbol and letter until it formed a word – not much different from what he does for a national audience.

Mr. Bailly breakfast no bigger than usual before the game. He does not do vocal exercises and does not drink tea to relax his vocal cords. However, he has a few tricks to make sure he says a word on the first try.

First he tries to make eye contact with the speller and make the moment more human.

“I think, ‘Can I get this person to make human contact and try to put them at ease?'” he said.

Then, as the contestant walks to the stage, Mr. Bailly looks at the word and reads it quietly to himself.

“When you read English you go pretty fast and take things for granted and occasionally do a double take,” he said. “I try to do a double take every time.”

If that doesn’t work, he has two fact-checkers next to him to check whether he pronounces words correctly. If he ever overlooks anything, he is “well aware,” he said, of co-professor Brian Sietsema’s elbow and chief judge Mary Brooks’ eyebrows.

Competitors usually stumble over non-English words, he said, especially French, a language so seeped into English that he’s cited it as the reason spelling bees exist. Frans may even bump into Mr. Bailly, a professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Vermont.

“If there’s one word I find difficult to spell, it’s French,” he said.