The word McMansion knocked out a Wisconsin contestant in the national spelling bee:

Wisconsin is out of the Scripps National Spelling Bee after all three of our representatives were knocked out of the competition, including Hanna Ghouse, 13, from Kenosha after she misspelled the word “McMansion” Wednesday.

However, TODAY’S TMJ4 wanted to put some average spellers to the test to see how they fared. We gave them the two commonly misspelled words according to Google, and Ghouse’s word “McMansion.”…

But to really put people to the test we gave them the word our local Scripps Spelling Bee contestant missed Wednesday, “McMansion.”

I guess the difficulty of the word is its relative lack of use. How often does the average person hear or see the word? Not often. A search of Google Ngram suggests the word is not used in many books though there has been a rise since the late 1990s. Perhaps someone is most likely to hear the term if they live in an older but attractive neighborhood where people are interested in tearing down the homes and constructing McMansions.