A 14-year-old girl from San Antonio, Texas, has won the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee after a first-ever "spell-off" was required for a champion to emerge in the extremely close competition.
Harini Logan takes home $50,000 from Scripps, plus further money prizes and reference works from Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica.
She beat Vikram Raju, 12, of Denver after their neck-and-neck competition required a "spell-off" to decide the winner, a first in the history of the Bee. The second-place prize is $25,000.
They claimed the top spots in the competition that pitted spellers ages 7-15 from across the United States and as far away as Guam for the 94th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee.
This year's competition was held at National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington DC.
In the spell-off, each competitor had 90 seconds to spell as many words correctly as possible. Vikram went first and spelled 15 words correctly of the 19 he attempted.
Harini, who waited for her turn in a sound-proof area, emerged to spell 21 words correctly of the 26 she attempted.
Both had the same list of words read to them, ringing a bell to signal they were ready to advance to the next word.
Harini is an eighth-grade student at The Montessori School of San Antonio. She loves creative writing and plans to publish a book in high school. When she's not spelling, she plays piano, recorder and is learning the ukulele.
This was her fourth and final year as a Bee contender.
The Bee was televised live. Play-by-play commentary heightens the excitement as contestants rack their brains to come up with the correct spellings for often obscure words.
The contestants were all required to test negative for Covid-19 to participate and were masked onstage except when actively competing.
In 2019, an eight-way tie included such mind-bending winning words as "erysipelas," a skin infection; "auslaut," the final sound in a word or syllable; "palama," webbing on the feet of aquatic birds; "pendeloque," a pear-shaped gemstone or glass pendant; "odylic," related to a hypothetical life force; "cernuous," drooping, "bougainvillea," a climbing plant; and "aiguillette," the braided ornament on military uniforms.
