This 12-year-old is a better speller than you
TIMNATH, Colo. — Twelve-year-old Nikhil Ganta dreams of one day becoming a "lawyer or financier," but for now, his main focus is spelling.
Last month, Ganta took home the state spelling bee championship after surviving a gruelling 55-round battle that lasted four and a half hours. Ganta beat out last year’s champion, Vedanth Raju, after the pair went head to head for the last 20 rounds.
“Sometimes the pressure gets to you I guess,” said Ganta, who correctly spelled “amaxophobia,” which means fear of riding in a car, to win.
Ganta, a sixth grader at Kinnard Core Knowledge Middle School in Fort Collins, is one of two Colorado students headed to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C.
Every May, more than 200 of the nation’s finest spellers compete for a $50,000 prize. The national tournament began in 1925, but in recent decades, the bee has grown increasingly competitive; many students study year round, turning to software like Spell Pundit and enlisting professional coaches.
From 1963 to 2003, the bee crowned only one champion each year.
But spellers have gotten “so good, so fast,” that judges declared co-champs three years in a row starting in 2014. In 2019, the bee ended in an eight-way tie.
Video: Cormac McCrimmon, Rocky Mountain PBS
On a Wednesday after school in March, Ganta rattled off the spellings of “argenton,” an alloy of nickel, copper and zinc first used for coins by the Swiss in 1850; “alliin,” a crystalline amino acid occurring in garlic oil; and “coccydynia,” tailbone pain.
“It’s become so competitive that you need to know things beyond what an average 12-year-old, or even an average adult, would know," said Ganta’s mom, Hima Maligireddy, who said her knowledge of German architecture has expanded as a result of quizzing her son.
Maligireddy spends dozens of hours per week preparing word lists while her son is at school.
“It’s sad that it’s become a competition for the privileged, where one parent can afford to give so much time or afford to spend on a tutor,” Maligireddy said.
Ganta competed in his first bee as a first grader.
At the time, he said he was a bit “reluctant,” but tried it anyway and won the school competition.
“Earlier I was a bit la-di-da, now it’s really intense,” Ganta said. He spends four hours studying on weekdays and six on the weekends.
Students can’t compete in the sport after eighth grade, so Ganta has just three more years. This is the first year he qualified to attend the national bee.
This is also the first year he started working with a spelling bee tutor. Ganta’s family now employs coach Scott Remer, who placed fourth at the bee in 2008 and has coached five national champions.
During a tutoring session over Zoom in March, Remer walked Ganta through linguistic patterns and trick words in Spanish, periodically quizzing Ganta to spell words, like guerrillero, which have made their way into the English language.
Prior to the national bee, spellers spend most of their time memorizing large lists of words. But at the national competition, judges can pull from any of the 470,000 words from the unabridged version of the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, which weighs more than 10 pounds.
Rather than rely on rote memorization, most students learn linguistic patterns that can help them piece together the correct spelling even when they’ve never encountered the word before. Students are allowed to ask for the definition, pronunciation, part of speech, etymology and usage in a sentence.
In addition to English, Ganta speaks Telugu, a regional language of India. He’s learning French in school and bits of Hindi from his grandmother so he can better eavesdrop on his parents, he said.
Since 1999, 29 of the last 35 Scripps National Spelling Bee champions have been Indian American.
“We speak four or five languages in India, so I think your brain is automatically wired up to absorb other languages, that’s my theory,” said Nikhil Ganta’s dad, Ashwin Ganta.
Ganta and his parents plan to travel to Washington the last week of May.
The semifinals and finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee will be broadcast on ION Television.
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