Sixth-grade speller crowned queen bee
OXON HILL, Maryland - Ananya Vinay never looked all that impressed by any of the words she was given in the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The 12-year-old from Fresno, California, showed little emotion and didn't take much time as she plowed through word after word. Sometimes she would blurt out questions, with little intonation "Part of speech?" "Language of origin?" and sometimes she didn't even bother.
Unflappable to the end, Ananya seized the opportunity when her steely opponent, Rohan Rajeev, flubbed a simple-looking but obscure Scandinavian-derived word, "marram", which means a beach grass. She calmly nailed two words in a row, ending on "marocain", which means a type of dress fabric of ribbed crepe, to win the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday.
