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Friday, May 29, 2009

At National Bee, kids vie to be US best speller

Time is GMT + 8 hours

Posted: 29-May-2009 16:39 hrs

Tim Ruiter from Reston, Virginia reacts after a misspell at the end of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee competition in Washington DC. More than half of the spellers were boys, but the eventual winner after a long night of brain-wracking, emotion and rather obscure words was Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas

A Breton word, "menhir," meaning an upright monumental stone, stumped one of the final three, Aishwarya Pastapur from Illinois. She got the "h" and the "i" in the wrong order.

The youngest finalist, 12-year-old Tim Ruiter from Virginia, who was also the only home-schooled youngster in the finals, had prepared for the competition by studying some 10,000 index cards on which he had printed out words that he knew he had to work on, his father John told AFP.

He was stumped by "maecenas," a generous sponsor or patron who was arguably less than generous with Ruiter.

But the boy for whom second grade teachers used to prepare a separate list of vocabulary words because he already knew all the words his peers were just learning, vowed to be back next year for the 83rd Scripps National Spelling Bee, a competition which remains as popular in the age of spell checkers as it was when it first began in 1925. — AFP

From TODAYOnline.com, Top Stories; see the source article here.


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