Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Tex., was declared champion of the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, winning on the word “koinonia” and surviving what was arguably the most intense competition in the bee’s 93-year history.
Along the way, he had to outlast a field of 16 finalists who vanquished words such as “Praxitelean,” “ispaghul” and “telyn” — sometimes without batting an eyelash — in a breathtaking show of spelling skill broadcast live on ESPN.
But Nemmani, who was competing at his first national bee, displayed the poise of a veteran, seeming to sail through his words: “condottiere” (knight or roving soldier available for hire), “miarolitic” (of igneous rock), “cendre” (a moderate blue), “ankyloglossia” (limited normal movement of the tongue), “grognard,” “passus,” “shamir” (tiny worm capable to splitting the hardest stone) and “jagüey” (an East Indian tree).
Often, Nemmani spelled with his arms clasped behind his back, barely betraying emotion. When it was down to two contestants — him and 12-year-old Naysa Modi, also from the Dallas area — Nemmani remained calm as Modi misspelled “Bewusstseinslage.”
Nemmani then knocked out “haecceitas” (the status of being an individual) before receiving the word that would clinch his win: “koinonia,” a word with Greek roots meaning a spiritual communion.
He nailed that one, too.
Only as confetti rained down on the stage did Nemmani break out into a broad smile.
“I’m just really happy,” he said moments after his victory. “This has just been a dream come true.”
Nemmani continued a longtime trend by becoming the 14th champion or co-champion of South Asian descent the bee has had in 11 consecutive years.
He almost wasn’t at the national bee at all. Remarkably, Nemmani has never won a regional or state bee — and in fact lost to Modi at the Collin County Spelling Bee earlier this year. He qualified for nationals under the bee’s new invitational program, “RSVBee,” which allowed those who didn’t win a regional bee to still apply for the nationals if they had won their school bee or been a former national finalist.
Because of RSVBee, this year, more than 500 spellers qualified to compete at nationals.
The 16 spellers took the stage Thursday night at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Maryland to battle it out for the title of champion. The competition was, in a word, brutal. In the first round of ESPN-televised spelling Thursday night, nearly half of the finalists misspelled their words, including several crowd favorites such as Tara Singh, a 13-year-old from Kentucky who was competing at her fifth and final national bee.
To even get to that point, the finalists had to survive nearly five hours of onstage spelling that started Thursday morning. Bee officials said the plan had been to whittle down the field to about a dozen contestants for the prime-time competition. It would take five rounds of onstage spelling to get to 16, the largest group ever to head into the championship finals.
The 16 finalists ranged in age from 11 to 14 and include nine girls and seven boys. The spellers come from all over the United States, plus one from Canada. And several had appeared at the national bee in previous years.
“I just try not to think about it,” said Modi, a sixth-grader from Frisco, Tex., competing in her fourth national bee, when asked after the Thursday afternoon spelling rounds about whether she might be a favorite to win. “That’s too much pressure.”
The massive field of spellers began competing in earnest Tuesday by taking a written test so difficult that there were no perfect scores this year.
Of note, however: All five spellers who scored the highest on the test were among the 16 finalists. That included Nemmani and Modi; 14-year-old Sravanth Malla of New York; 12-year-old Shruthika Padhy of New Jersey; and 12-year-old Aisha Randhawa of Riverside, Calif.
The expanded field also forced several logistical changes, such as an extra day of onstage spelling this week.
For hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, the spellers, who ranged in age from 8 to 14, tackled hundreds of mind-bending words, including “glossodynia” (a pain in the tongue), “stolon” (a horizontal branch from the base of a plant that produces new plants from buds at its tip or nodes) and “triturate” (to crush or grind).
Photos from the 2018 Scripps National Spelling Bee
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The additional day of spelling meant that Jacques Bailly, the bee’s longtime pronouncer — who is treated with almost iconic reverence by the spellers — took breaks for the first time ever to preserve his voice, handing over the microphone to associate pronouncer Brian Sietsema for a couple of the preliminary rounds.
It was hard for him to pull back, Bailly said Wednesday.
“I would probably run myself into the ground doing this, because I just love doing it,” he said. “But I recognize with three days that I’ve got to do some pacing, to make sure I’m really on my game and we have full attention for every speller on there.”
On Wednesday night, bee officials used test scores to determine that 41 spellers would move on to the finals, to compete under the glaring lights of prime-time television. (Bee rules state that no more than 50 contestants can advance to the finals.) The new wild-card program paid off for a number of spellers: Of the 41 finalists, 16 had qualified through RSVBee, and four of those contestants moved on to the prime-time finals.
The winner of the bee receives $40,000 and a trophy from the Scripps Bee, a $2,500 cash prize (and a complete reference library) from Merriam-Webster, trips to New York and Hollywood as part of a media tour, and a pizza party for their school.
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