MISQUAH — The folders came out of the second drawer of a filing cabinet in the district office Thursday: six of them, manila, labeled in a handwriting that a substantial portion of this town would recognize at forty paces, containing the Friday spelling lists Doris Knutson gave her fourth graders from 1974 until she retired in 2011.

They will supply the words for the first Doris Knutson Spelldown, set for the last Friday in September in the Lakeside gym, grades three through six. The organizing committee — three teachers and the district secretary — spent Thursday afternoon reading them, and reports that the work took considerably longer than planned because nobody could get through a folder without stopping to say something out loud.

The lists are not what a person expects. There are the ordinary words, in ordinary order. And then, every few weeks, in the same hand: a word that has no business on a fourth-grade list. Quarantine. Millinery. Onomatopoeia, in November of 1988, followed by nothing, as though it had been dropped in to see what would happen. Teachers who had her as students report that she called these “the ones for whoever wants them,” that they were never graded, and that she kept a separate list in her head of which children tried.

Phil Brekke, who will pronounce, was given a set of copies Friday and has been, per his wife, “in the den, saying words at the wall.” He declined to be interviewed on the subject of his preparation but did offer one comment, which was that a pronouncer’s job is to say the word twice, use it in a sentence, and then stop talking, and that the third part is where most people go wrong.