87th Scripps National Spelling Bee

The 87th Scripps National Spelling Bee was held from May 27 to May 29, 2014^[1] at the Gaylord National in Oxon Hill, Maryland and was broadcast live on ESPN3, the semi-finals on ESPN2, with the final rounds live on ESPN.^[2] Ansun Sujoe of Fort Worth, Texas and Sriram Hathwar of Painted Post, New York won the competition, making the 87th Bee the twelfth in the past sixteen competitions to have an Indian-American champion.

Competition details

• 281 spellers participated in the 2014 competition.
• This year's competition welcomed 208 new spellers around the world.
• The youngest competitor, at 8 years old, was Hussain A. Godhrawala from South Carolina.
• Syamantak Payra, one of the finalists in the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee, was eliminated in round five by the word circumforaneous, meaning "wandering from one place to another place".
• Vanya Shivashankar, sister of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee winner Kavya Shivashankar, was unable to pass the semi-finals.

Finals

Both Sujoe and Hathwar spelled their words incorrectly in Round 16 of the championship round. Hathwar misspelled the word corpsbruder, meaning a close comrade. However, Sujoe was unable to take the advantage of the slip-up, misspelling antigropelos, meaning waterproof leggings.^[3]

For the rest of the 25-word championship list they spelled every word correctly. In the final round, Hathwar correctly spelled stichomythia and Sujoe correctly spelled feuilleton, exhausting the list of words. As co-champions, Hathwar and Sujoe were the seventh and eighth consecutive Indian-Americans to win the competition.^[4] It was the first time the competition ended in co-champions in over 50 years, since the 1962 bee.^[5]

Word list championship round

References