San Diego girl wins spelling bee
Snigdha Nandipati, 14, is fifth Indian-american winner in a row.
OXON HILL, MD. —
Snigdha Nandipati is the National Spelling Bee champion.
The 14-year-old from San Diego spelled guetapens, a French-derived word that means ambush, snare or trap. Calm and collected, she beat out eight other finalists in the brain-busting competition.
Nandipati is an avid reader, violinist and coin collector who plans to become a psychiatrist or neurosurgeon.
She’s also the fifth consecutive Indian-American winner and 10th in the last 14 years.
Stuti Mishra, of West Melbourne, Fla., finished second after misspelling “schwarmerei.”
Out of 278 participants who gathered at a convention center outside Washington, nine made it to the finals Thursday.
Nandipati was first up and correctly spelled “psammon,” which means an ecological community.
Hours earlier, Lena Greenberg, a home-schooled 14-yearold from Philadelphia, became the last to make the finals when she spelled “cholecystitis” — an inflammation of the gallbladder.
Meanwhile, 41 semifinalists heard the dreaded bell that signals an incorrect spelling. Those included one of the favorites, Vanya Shivashankar, 10, of Olathe, Kan. The younger sister of the 2009 champion got the only perfect score in the preliminary rounds.
Shivashankar was flummoxed by “pejerrey,” a small fish. She went with “perjere.”
For winning the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee, Nandipati receives $30,000 in cash, a trophy, a $2,500 savings bond, a $5,000 scholarship and $2,600 in reference works from the Encyclopedia Britannica.