Snigdha Nandipati heard a few words she didn’t know during the National Spelling Bee, but never when she stepped to the microphone.
Calm and collected throughout, the 14-year-old Indian-American from San Diego spelled “guetapens,” a French-derived word that means ambush, snare or trap, to win the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night in Oxon Hill, Maryland. She beat eight other finalists. in the nervewracking, brainbusting competition.
“I knew it. I’d seen it before,” Snigdha, who was a semi-finalist last year, said of the winning word. Stuti Mishra of West Melbourne, Florida, finished second after misspelling “schwarmerei”
She stood before the microphone with her hands clasped in front of a tense audience to spell the winning word.
“It’s a miracle,” Snigdha, who reads encyclopaedias for fun, said after winning the contest.
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The families that packed out a convention centre in Maryland, just south of Washington, to watch the young contestants could be forgiven for being tense — Snigdha’s prizes included $30,000 (£19,505) cash, a $2,500 US savings bond and a $5,000 scholarship.
On her way to victory Snigdha had spelt words including “admittatur”, an admission certificate, “arrondissement”, a French urban district, and “saccharolytic”, referring to the breakdown of sugars in metabolism.
After spelling the winning word, Snigdha looked from side to side, as if unsure her accomplishment was real — she was not immediately announced as the winner. Applause built slowly, and a few pieces of confetti trickled out before showering her. Then her younger brother ran on stage and embraced her, and she beamed.
Snigdha’s grandparents, who flew to the contest from Hyderabad, India, said she studied six hours a day during the week and 10 to 12 hours during the weekend.
Second place went to Stuti Mishra, a 14-year-old from Orlando, Florida, who finished in second place after misspelling “schwarmerei”, a German word for excessive enthusiasm.
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Arvind Mahankali, a 12-year-old seventh grader from Bayside Hills, New York, finished third for the second year in a row after failing to spell “schwannoma”, a type of nerve cell tumour.
Asked what she would do with her prize money, Snigdha said: “I don’t know, save it for college.”
Snigdha, Stuti and Arvind were among nine finalists from the 278 contestants who started the nationwide spelling contest on Wednesday.
The spellers employed strategies from writing out words on the palms of their hands with their fingers to asking for a word’s language of origin. The runner-up, Stuti, mimed typing them on a keyboard.
Six-year-old Lori Anne Madison of Woodbridge, Virginia, the youngest participant ever to qualify for the bee, failed to make it past the preliminary round after incorrectly spelling the word “ingluvies”, the crop of a bird or insect.
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Snigdha is the fifth American of South Asian origin to win the venerable competition in as many consecutive years. A coin collector and Sherlock Holmes fan, she aspires to become a physician or neurosurgeon.
In the meantime, the young bookworm is likely to make short work of one of her prizes — $2,600 in reference works from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.