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Zaila, who just finished eighth grade in her hometown, Harvey, La., showed a prowess for spelling at 10, when her father, who had been watching finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN, asked her how to spell the winning word: marocain. “I got it this time,” Zaila said in a televised interview after her win. One of the few words that rattled her on Thursday was “nepeta,” a unique herb that The New York Times described in 2014 as “intoxicating to cats but relaxing to humans.” Zaila attributed her win, in part, to luck. “It’s super exciting to win because now I get to get a nice trophy, which is the best part of any win,” she told an interviewer on ESPN. When the confetti burst around her, she jumped back, surprised, then spun around. “That is correct,” said a judge, Mary Brooks, as Zaila held her head in her hands and jumped in the air. She began to spell it, stopped herself, and asked for the language of origin.Īs with so many words before, she needed almost no time to solve its structure and spell it. “Does this word contain like the English word murray, which would be the name of a comedian?” Zaila asked, referring to the actor Bill Murray and drawing laughs from the pronouncer and the judges. At first, she seemed flummoxed by murraya, grimacing a little when Dr. Bailly, the pronouncer, gave her a new challenge. Throughout the competition, she appeared to know nearly every word and its origins, smiling each time Jacques A. She received the word murraya (a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees having pinnate leaves and flowers with imbricated petals ). That gave Zaila, 14, a chance to win it all with one more correct word, which would make her the first Black American student to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee in almost a century of contests. Which Chaitra got wrong, exchanging the O in “neroli” for an E.
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And finally neroli oil (a fragrant pale yellow essential oil obtained from flowers chiefly of the sour orange and used especially in cologne and as a flavoring). Then retene (a chemical isolated especially from pine tar, rosin oil and various fossil resins but usually prepared from abietic acid), which Zaila got right. The last few words were rattled off in a swift spelling duel, with only two finalists still on the stage, Chaitra Thummala and Zaila Avant-garde.įirst was fewtrils (things of little value), which Chaitra, a 12-year-old who just finished sixth grade in San Francisco, got right.
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Image Zaila Avant-garde, the winner of the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee.