2 . Fourteen-year-old Harini Logan won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last Thursday, defeating 12-year-old Vikram Raju in a tiebreaker. It’s the first time that the contest has ever been decided by a tie-breaking round of spelling.

A spelling bee is a contest where players take turns spelling words. Though the bee is mainly about spelling, it also focuses on the meaning of the words. During parts of the contest, students were asked to choose the correct meaning of a word.

That caused trouble for Harini. She was asked about the meaning of the word “pullulation”. She said the word described the nesting of birds. The contest organizers had expected the answer to be the “swarming of bees”. Harini was removed from the contest. But soon she was back in- the judges double-checked and learned that Harini’s definition was also correct. One by one, the other students spelled a word wrong and got out. Finally, only Harini and Vikram were left.

To make ties much less likely, a “spell-off” was added to the contest in recent years. In the spell-off, Vikram and Harini each took turns trying to spell the words they were asked, but both made blunders. At one point, Harini could have won by spelling the word “drimys” (a kind of plant) correctly. But she missed it.

That put the two into a super tie-breaking event, where they were each given 90 seconds to correctly spell as many words as they could. The New York Times reports that the two spelled so quickly that the judges needed to review the video to see who had won. In 90 seconds, Vikram had spelled 15 words correctly, Harini had 21 correct spellings, making her the new winner.

This was Harini’s fourth at the Bee and it’s the first time she’s made it to the finals. Describing her win, she said, “This is just such a dream!”

Yours,

Li Hua