Video: State Spelling Bee Champs Prepare for Nationals

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STARKVILLE, Miss.(WCBI)–Having pushed their way past dozens of their peers in state and regional spelling competitions, a Starkville Academy student and another from Winston Academy are headed to Washington, D. C. to compete on the national level.

Starkville Academy student Bates Bennette is spending a lot of time reading words from the dictionary and surfing the internet these days. On March 7th, he correctly spelled frankincense to win the Midsouth Regional Spelling competition in Memphis to earn his second shot at the national title in three years. He also won as a sixth grader and knows that prepping for the nationals is a tall task.

“So you spend more time on different parts of the word from different languages. And knowing how that language spells their words,” said Bates Bennette/Starkville Academy Spelling Bee Champ.

Meanwhile, a half an hour away, Winston Academy’s Dev Jaiswal won the title covering the southern portion of Mississippi on March 17th. He correctly spelled Eleatic to earn the trip to Washington. Dev’s sister, Rani, competed in Washington five years ago.

When in stiff competition, a list of prepared words are used, when that runs out, spelling bee contestants are asked to spell words from the dictionary they may be seeing for the very first time. That’s when their gifted skills kick in.

“Certain languages have their different spelling patterns. So if like for example the word is Latin and I hear a certain part that I know that means you know for; then I know that that part is in there and the definition, the root words would help me try to identify how to spell it,” said Bates Bennette.

“And they told me it was Greek, and I just tried to use my knowledge of Greek to make a good guess,” said Dev Jaiswal.

It is going to be interesting to see if their academic skills are enough to defeat others of their kind in upcoming national spelling bee competition.

The 88th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee will be televised May 24-29 on ESPN.