2018′s Champion Speller
June 5, 2018
Last week, on May 31, 14-year-old Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Texas, correctly spelled koinonia to win the 91st Scripps National Spelling Bee at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center near Washington, D.C. Nemmani, an eighth-grader at McKinney’s Scoggins Middle School, outlasted the record-setting 514 other spellers to win the national title. There were 291 regional entrants last year. A special program called RSVBee brought many more students into the competition this year, including Nemmani.
Karthik Nemmani jubilantly raises the championship trophy after correctly spelling koinonia to win the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Credit: © Scripps National Spelling Bee
In the final rounds of the tense championship final, Nemmani went head-to-head against 12-year-old Naysa Modi of Frisco, Texas, who eventually misspelled Bewusstseinslage (a psychology term meaning a state of consciousness or a feeling devoid of sensory components). Nemmani then took the title with haecceitas and koinonia. Haecceitas is the status of being an individual. Koinonia is defined as an “intimate spiritual communion and participative sharing in a common religious commitment and spiritual community.”
Nemmani is the 14th consecutive Indian American to win the national spelling bee and the 19th of the past 23 winners with Indian heritage. If you are curious what it takes to win the national spelling bee, here is a short list of other championship round words: ankyloglossia, condottiere, jagüey, miarolitic, passus, and shamir. (Definitions are below at the end of the article.)
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The Scripps National Spelling Bee. Credit: Scripps National Spelling Bee
The annual English language Scripps National Spelling Bee begins with 11 million students from the United States and its overseas territories as well from the Bahamas, Canada, Ghana, Jamaica, Japan, and South Korea. Regional competitions and the RSVBee program bring the spellers—who can compete through age 15 and eighth grade—to National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, just outside the U.S. capital, for the championship “Bee Week.” Preliminary rounds reduce the field to 16 excellent spellers, who gather on stage for the bee’s championship final, which is broadcast nationally on ESPN. The bee winner earns $40,000 along with other prizes; $30,000 is awarded to second place. After winning this year’s competition, Nemmani said, “I’m just really happy. This has just been a dream come true.”
The first National Spelling Bee, a much smaller event organized by the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal newspaper, took place in 1925. The E. W. Scripps Company, based in nearby Cincinnati, Ohio, has sponsored the spelling bee since 1941. The competition was not held for three years during World War II (1939-1945).
Ankyloglossia means limited normal movement of the tongue. A condottiere is a knight or roving soldier available for hire. A jagüey is an East Indian tree. Miarolitic means of igneous rock. A passus is a division or part of a narrative poem. A shamir is a tiny worm capable of splitting the hardest stone.
