As the newly crowned empress of the alphabet, Ananya Vinay knows heiligenschein from durchkomponiert, and can tell the difference between a sceloporus and a strepsiceros.
But after fending off 11 million other children to win the coveted Scripps National Spelling Bee — America’s gold standard for young wordsmiths — even the 12-year-old champion declared herself stumped yesterday by President Trump’s word of the week: covfefe. “Language of origin?” she inquired after she was challenged during a post-competition television appearance to spell the word, which formed part of a clumsy-fingered, late-night Twitter post by Mr Trump this week.
“Gibberish,” the hosts told her, leaving Ananya to hazard an erroneous guess — her first misstep after a flawless display.
The finals of the National Spelling Bee, held in Maryland, pitted the top 0.000026 per cent of the competition’s 11 million school-age contestants against one another over the course of three days and 21 rounds.
“Ananya proved her depth of knowledge of root words and word origins to master round after round of some of the most challenging words in the English language,” said Rich Boehne, president of the E W Scripps Company, the media conglomerate sponsoring the event.
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Shourav Dasari, a 13-year-old from Texas who had been favoured to outlast all 290 other finalists to take the top spot, was placed fourth after stumbling over the spelling of struldbrug — the name given to the immortal people in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
Erin Howard, 11, from Alabama, stunned judges when she took to the stage and demanded: “OK, you really have to give me a word I know right now — really.”
The judges responded by inviting her to tackle apparentement (an alliance of French political parties formed during an election). “I’m sorry, did you misunderstand my request?” Erin replied. She rattled out the word correctly nonetheless but later crashed out with klydonograph (an instrument that takes images of electrical surges in power lines).
The youngest “spellebrity” was Edith Fuller, who at the age of six breezed through nyctinasty (the movement of a plant in response to light and dark), having worked her way through regional qualifying rounds with words such as jnana (a Sanskrit term for knowledge) and Panglossian (a person given to extreme optimism in the face of adversity).
She burst into tears when she was evicted from the competition for flunking a written test, but told reporters afterwards that she did not mind losing because she had bigger plans for the future, such as inventing a new kind of refrigerator.
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Ananya won $40,000 and a trophy, and at first showed little reaction as confetti showered around her when she vanquished the runner-up Rohan Rajeev, 14.
He crashed out with a misspelling of marram (a Scandinavian-derived word for beach grass); Ananya stormed to victory with marocain (crepe fabric used in dressmaking). She is the 13th consecutive Indian-American to win the spelling bee; 18 of the past 22 winners have been of the same heritage.