Snigdha is Supreme! San Diego 8th-Grader Wins National Spelling Bee

Updated at 8:45 p.m. May 31, 2012

Snigdha Nandipati of Rancho Peñasquitos hoisted a heavy trophy Thursday night after spelling guetapens and winning the Scripps National Spelling Bee in a suburb of Washington.

“It's a miracle,” she said, surrounded by her family on stage, when asked her reaction on the ESPN telecast.

Snigdha is the second Southern Californian to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which began in 1925, following Anurag Kashyap of Poway, the 2005
champion.

The 14-year-old student from Francis Parker School defeated 277 other youngsters from across the country and several other nationals, including New Zealand and Jamaica.

“I knew it,” Snigdha said of guetapens—her winning word. (It means an ambush, snare or trap.) “I'd seen it before. I just wanted to ask everything I could before I started to spell it.” 
  
Snigdha, who tied for 27th in last year's bee, got her chance for the victory when the other remaining speller—Stuti Mishra, a 14-year-old eighth-grader from West Melbourne, FL, misspelled schwarmerei, giving an E as the fifth letter instead of an A for the noun meaning excessive, unbridled enthusiasm or attachment.

Both Snigdha and Stuti were competing in the bee for the final time as it is limited to students in eighth grade or below.

Snigdha was among the 278 contestants at the start of the bee. The field was reduced to 50 based on the scores for a 50-word spelling test taken Tuesday and Wednesday's second- and third-round results, in which spellers receive three points for each word spelled correctly.

The competition moved to the semifinals, where a mistake eliminates a contestant.

Snigdha began the semifinals by nailing the spelling of stochastically, meaning random. She then correctly spelled compass—a type of Haitian music,
and rhonchus—a snoring-type sound, making her among the nine spellers Thursday night’s finals at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.

In the finals, Snigdha correctly spelled psammon, which refers to a group of microorganisms that live in water; ajimez, a word for an Arabic type of twin window; luteovirescent, which means greenish-yellow; saccharolytic, which describes a process of breaking down sugars; admittatur, a certificate of admission formerly given by a college or university; and arrondissement, the word for a municipal subdivision in France, before her winning word.

Snigdha will receive $30,000 from Scripps, which owns television stations and newspapers; a $5,000 scholarship from the Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation; $2,600 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica, including its final print edition, and a lifetime membership to Britannica Online Premium; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond; a complete reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and a Nook Color and online language course from Middlebury Interactive Languages.

City News Service contributed to this report.