Wake students survive a marathon five-hour, 50-round spelling bee with A-P-L-O-M-B

After 50 rounds, only the rock star spellers remained onstage — a pair of orthographic tail-kickers who nailed every obscure word Merriam-Webster could throw: ginglymus, widdershins and cynocephali.

As a judge at the Wake County bee, I couldn’t pronounce the words these kids were swatting down like gnats, let alone spell them. I’d been sitting there five hours, waiting for a stumper as lunchtime came and went, tearing through three packs of Cheez-Its while endlessly repeating, “That is correct.”

Between them, these middle-schoolers pulled off spelling Gurmulchi, Saoshyant, rond de jambe and poudre B. Declaring a winner seemed almost pointless.

But in the end, seventh-grade Chaitra Yeccherla lasted longest, taking the tallest trophy and surviving what felt like word war. I hadn’t even competed, and I ached like I’d been stabbed with a capital T.

“That was very, very nerve-wracking,” said Yeccherla, the champ from Mills Park Middle School.

So I’m here today to celebrate the top three spellers from the Wake district, all of them bound for more fun at the statewide level: Yeccherla, Ananya Rao Prassanna of Davis Drive Middle and Reyansh Joshi of Mills Park Elementary.

Worthy of all the attention

Let’s give them the same attention we show football players, or even science project winners. For a marathon session long enough to watch “Titanic” nearly twice, they faced down a word list that included bobbejean, schipperke and Hoomalimali. As I type this, spellcheck is underlining those words in red — because it can’t spell as well as these three kids.

For most of us who experienced them, spelling bees are a form of ritualized torture as merciless and isolating as shooting a free throw with the game on the line.

What other form of middle school competition gives you a microphone and complete silence, so when you goof up, your mistake get amplified over an entire auditorium?

And when you inevitably flub a word — because spelling bees grind on through hopeless stalemates until somebody cracks — that word gets stamped in the wet cement of your memory with the force of a combat boot.

Do I speak from harsh experience?

A-B-S-O-U-L-U-T-E-L-Y.

At least five times throughout the five-hour ordeal, I looked over at my fellow judge and News & Observer colleague Lars Dolder and whispered, “No way anybody spells these next words.” And at least five times, I shook my head and popped another Cheez-It.

I spoke to to Chaitra Yeccherla and her father shortly after her win, and the young champ told me she had been competing since second grade. If you go on YouTube, you can watch her practicing at age 5, nailing “serpentine” and “arboreal” with a stuffed Hello Kitty in her lap.

That’s her brother Akshar quizzing her. Back in 2018, they both finished in the top three at the district bee: Akshar in second and Chaitra third. Akshar went on to the national level in Washington, D.C., but his sister isn’t intimidated by his long shadow.

“Maybe he’s rusty,” she said.

The word in a sentence

Of all the words in 50 rounds, only one gave Yeccherla a second’s pause: naumachia, which is, of course, the word for a mock Roman naval battle.

In this case, Yeccherla employed the time-honored strategy of guessing, but I picked up a strategy in case anyone ever sponsors an old timer’s spelling bee.

Pro tip: Always ask for the word in a sentence, plus the definition, plus the origin, plus the part of speech.

How else to distinguish between frison with one s, meaning the extra silk on the outside of a cocoon, and frisson with two esses, meaning a sudden thrill?

But it also helps to be awesome, a title this Cheez-It engorged judge hereby decrees upon each of these distinguished spellers. Wake County sends you all its A-P-P-R-O-B-A-T-I-O-N.

By the way, orthographic means “the art of writing words with the proper letters according to standard usage,” in case you had to look it up.

I did.