>And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.

The full Webster's (which is probably the closest to a standard for American English) is 263K entries (which Google tells me is what is used for the Scripp's spelling bee) vs. 350K for Oxford. So smaller but not that much smaller. The standard Webster's is "only" 75K but there's also a truncated version of Oxford that's 125K.