Dubai: After competing against 69 other students from across the UAE in a battle of words and their etymologies, 15-year-old Nirmal Jimmy beat the cream of the speller’s crop, walking away with a grand prize of Dh25,000 on Saturday and the accolade of being the best speller in the country.
The Grand Finals of the Danube Spelling Bee Championship 2015-2016, an offshoot of the famous Scripps Spelling Bee in the US, took place at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel yesterday. More than 2,000 students from 33 schools across the UAE participated in the preliminary round last year. That number trickled down to 700 before the Bee was locked down to just 69 students.
The word that won Nirmal, who is a ninth grade student at DPS Dubai, the grand prize was preceptor: a teacher or instructor. The first runner up won Dh15,00, while the second runner up received Dh10,000.
The top ten were also given various trophies and prizes, including laptops, mobile phones and cameras.
“I wasn’t expecting to win at all,” Jimmy said. “I started properly training just under a month ago after I entered the final round. We were given a list of 1,500 words, which were going to be among the words we had to spell. I committed myself to studying those words, their roots, prefixes, suffixes and etymologies. I worked hard but I wasn’t expecting to win. I seriously wasn’t, I don’t think my family was either.”
When asked what she was going to do with the money, Jimmy said she was going to save most of it for college. “But of course, I’m going to spend some of it to celebrate. I’m taking my family out to a nice dinner.”
Mirle Shivashankar, chief judge, said the Bee was not just about memorising the spelling of words. He said that understanding a word’s etymology gives a deeper perspective on its connotation and how it travelled through history.
“The Bee sparks a healthy competition between students,” he said. “It’s not just about a trophy or a prize. Competitors win something much more valuable than that, they gain a deeper insight into words, their meanings, and how they’ve come to be formed.”
Each of Shivashankar’s two daughters have won the Scripps Spelling Bee prize in the US, a first in the competition’s history, he says, which sees eleven million students competing for the Grand Prize.
“The passion for words runs in the family. Breaking up a word shows you in a way what they mean,” he said. “A simple example would be microscope, which has Greek roots. Micro means ‘small’, while scope means ‘see’. Another one is Philadelphia, which come from the Greek ‘I love’ and ‘brother’.”
Shivashankar said learning the etymology of words also aids students in other subjects.
“Polygon, when broken down, means many angles,” he said. “Trigonometry comes from the Greek ‘triangle’ and ‘measure’.”
Shivashankar said the Miriam Webster Third New International Dictionary, which contains more than 470,000 words, was used as a reference for the Bee. He also said that in the final round, competitors were tested with words that were on the list. “Many think that longer words are harder to spell,” he said. “That’s a myth. The roots of longer word are more salient. It’s the smaller ones that are tricky.”
Renuka Singh, managing director of Raging Tiger Events, established the Danube Spelling Bee in the UAE four years ago.
“I used to live in the US,” she said, “and after coming to the UAE I saw the need for something like this in the UAE. The competition helps students widen their knowledge base and even increases their confidence.”
The competition has been popular since its establishment.
“We’ve had thousands and thousands of students competing in the Bee every year. It’s very exciting, seeing the number trickle down from two to three thousand to just one: the best speller in the UAE.”