Fourteen-year-old Karthik Nemmani from McKinney, Texas, has won the 2018 Scripps Spelling Bee Championship after spelling the word ‘koinonia’ correctly.
In round 18, the word koinonia, which means ‘Christian fellowship or communion, with God or, more commonly, with fellow Christians’, came as the final challenge for the eighth-grader to win the title.
In the semi-final round, he had a face-off with a seventh grader Naysa Modi, another Texan from Frisco. Naysa did not pass the round when she spelled the word ‘Bewusstseinslage’ incorrectly. The word means ‘a state of consciousness or a feeling devoid of sensory components’.
Nemmani passed the round with his correctly-spelled ‘haecceitas’, which means ‘the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing that make it a particular thing’.
A fifth grader, Abhijay Kodali, from Flower Mound, Texas, reached Round no. 16 and was among the top three contenders.
