WATCH: National Spelling Bee Champion Knocks Out Dozens of Words You’ve Never Heard Of at Breakneck Speed
Harini Logan won the Scripps National Spelling Bee competition on Thursday, which included a spell-off where the 14-year-old from Texas rapidly spelled words most adults have likely never even heard of.
Logan beat out 12-year-old Vikram Raju and received prize money totaling $50,000. In a 90-second speed round, Logan spelled 22 words correctly, and Raju got 15 right. This was Logan’s fourth competition and it was the first in-person spelling bee since 2019, recent competitions being either canceled or heavily changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bee this year was hosted by Reading Rainbow star LeVar Burton.
“This is such a dream, this is my fourth bee and I’m just so overwhelmed,” she said after receiving her trophy.
Of the speed round spelling, she said, “I just had to take a deep breath and tell myself to go out there and do my best.”
Some of the dizzying words included in the final round were words like spealbone, pyrrolidone, and tauromachian. Logan spelled each word thrown at her with a breakneck pace and confidence.
Her final word was moorhen, which means a “female of the red grouse,” according to Scripps.
#Speller231 Harini Logan’s final winning word:
moorhen
part of speech: noun
def: the female of the red grouse.
Language of origin: This word is originally English.
Sentence: The hunter took aim at the moorhen after the beaters had flushed it from the heather.— Scripps National Spelling Bee (@ScrippsBee) June 3, 2022
In a word meaning round, Logan was actually nearly dumped from the competition, but judges reevaluated and determined her definition for pullulation was acceptable.
Logan previously placed 31st in 2021 at the Scripps competition, 30th in 2019, and below 300 the year before.
On top of host Burton, First Lady Jill Biden was also brought in to help promote the televised competition, speaking with Burton on Wednesday about her own past experience with spelling bees.
“We had a spelling bee in my class and I won that spelling bee,” Biden said. “I was supposed to go to the next level but I was so afraid of speaking out in public, that the next day, I told my mother I was sick and I didn’t go to school and I never went to the spelling bee.”
