Photos: Conjunctivitus
Apparently, an easy word for a 13-year-old to spell
The 49th Annual Georgia Statewide Spelling Bee sponsored by the Georgia Association of Educators took place March 19 in a hushed ballroom at Georgia State University. The room was filled with anixious parents, spelling bee judges, word pronouncers and twenty of the state’s top spellers who competed to move on to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. The students ranging in grades from 4th to 8th battled in a single elimination format through round after round. Some words they were asked to spell were seemingly easy like, decibel, or nullification others like protanopia or doxology, not so much.
The contest lasted over two and a half intense hours before Julia Denniss, 13, was crowned the state champ with the spelling of the word ‘conjunctivitis.’ “My winning word was not that difficult because I had studied it,” she said after the competition “but the word lixiviation earlier in the competition, I had not studied, that was the most difficult word for me but I just asked for the pronunciation and then sounded it out.”
Denniss was also the Georgia state champ last year. She goes to Marist School in Dunwoody and was rewarded $1475.00 and a trip to the national competition in Washington, D.C June 2-4, 2010, where the best speller in the country will be crowned. “There are a lot of words in the Websters Dictionary – over 476,000,” her father Michael Denniss, who helps prep her every year, said. “She studied Greek, Latin, diseases, medical terms, and food. For example, you have to know all your different types of pasta.”
Watch the final round of the Georgia State Spelling Bee.
(Photo and text by Joeff Davis)