84th Scripps National Spelling Bee

Sukanya Roy, Champion of the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The 84th Scripps National Spelling Bee was held from May 31 - June 2, 2011 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland near Washington, D.C.. The champion was 14-year-old Sukanya Roy, who was the fourth consecutive person of Indian-American descent to win the competition.

• 275 spellers participated in this year's competition, representing the United States, American Samoa, the Bahamas, Canada, China, hohhohohongbee.com/statistics Statistics], accessed 3 June 2011.</ref>^[1]
• Two championship finalists from 2010 returned to participate in this Bee; Joanna Ye of Pennsylvania^[2] and Laura Newcombe of Ontario, Canada.^[3]
• This year was the seventh time the champion has come from Pennsylvania.
• This was the fourth year in a row and ninth time since 1999 that the champion has been of Indian-American descent.
• During the last rounds of the final five spellers, 20 words were spelled correctly. This is the equivalent of 4 full competition rounds with no incorrectly spelled words.
• This year, the Bee also lasted approximately 3 full hours, 1.5 hours more than the originally scheduled length.

Top finishers

From left to right: Laura Newcombe, Dakota Jones, Arvind Mahankali and Joanna Ye.

• Sukanya Roy, of South Abington Township, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, representing the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, won the competition by spelling cymotrichous.^[4][5]
• Laura Newcombe, of Toronto, Ontario, was the runner-up. She was eliminated by the word sorites as psorites.^[6]
• Joanna Ye, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Arvind Mahankali, of Forest Hills, New York, tied for third place. Ye was eliminated by the word galoubet as galubey,^[7] while Mahankali misspelled jugendstil as uguntschtiel.^[8]
• Dakota Jones, of Las Vegas, Nevada, placed fifth; he was eliminated by the word zanja, spelling it as zangha.^[9]
• Veronica Penny, of Rockland, Ontario, Dhivya Senthil Murugan, of Denver, Colorado, Sriram Hathwar, of Painted Post, New York, and Mashad Arora of Brownsville, Texas, tied for sixth place.
• Lily Jordan, of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Nabeel Rahman, of Buffalo, New York, and Prakash Mishra, of Waxhaw, North Carolina, tied for tenth place.
• Samuel Estep, of Berryville, Virginia, placed thirteenth.

References

External links

• Scripps National Spelling Bee official website