The National Latin Vocabulary Exam entered its sixth year in 2022. It is a young competition still accumulating its history, and an unsparing one: structured by level, it tests each student on the Latin vocabulary and inflected forms relevant to their own stage of study — no surrounding context to lean on, no passage to help narrow a guess. The words and their endings are either known or they are not. Eleven students at Emerson Latin earned Gold Medals. The full record is set down below.
- Charles Cho
- Jaye Cho
- Woojin Choi
- Hyunjun Kim
- Esther Lee
- Grace Lee
- Jinmin Lee
- Rachel Lee
- Victoria Park
- Jewon Shin
- Minkyung Song
- Jian Hong
- Yeonwoo Sung
- Liz Kang
- Chae-Eun Park
Latin vocabulary is not memorized so much as accumulated — word by word, through reading, through repetition, through the slow process of a word moving from something you look up to something you simply know. And the inflected endings are not drilled so much as internalized: they begin as paradigms on a page and, over time, become instinct. An examination that tests nothing but that knowledge — the words and their forms, stripped of any surrounding assistance — is a fair measure of how far that process has actually gone. Eleven Gold Medals tells you it has gone quite far.
Emerson Latin students have placed in this competition consistently since its early years. The names change as students advance; the results do not. That, rather than any single year’s performance, is the record we point to.