Nihar Janga, a fifth-grade student from Austin, Texas, and Jairam Hathwar, a seventh-grader from Painted Post, New York, were co-winners of the US Scripps National Spelling Bee 2016 on Thursday.
After battling 25 rounds in the gruelling finals, Jairam spelled “feldenkrais” correctly, the name of a somatic educational system, while Nihar nailed the spelling of “gesellschaft”, a word for social relations based on impersonal ties.
With the victory of the two Indian-American boys, this became the third consecutive year where the Scripps National Spelling Bee ended in a tie, reported The Guardian.
This is also the ninth year in a row that an Indian-American has won the competition
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In 2014, Sriram J Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe shared the title. Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam fought their way to a tie in 2015.
13 year-old Jairam is the younger brother of the 2014 co-champion, Sriram Hathwar. Nihar (11), who was also called “The Machine” by one of the judges, became the youngest winner of the spelling bee competition.
Each of them will receive a trophy and $45,000 in cash and prizes.
Seven out of the ten finalists in this year’s bee were Indian Americans.
Apart from Nihar and Jairam, the other five who made it to the finals were Snehaa Ganesh Kumar, Rutvik M. Gandhasri, Sreeniketh A. Vogoti, Jashun Paluru and Smrithi Upadhyayula.
This year, the spelling bee included words derived from comparatively trickier languages like Afrikaans, Danish, Irish Gaelic, Maori and Mayan.
Among the other words the two of them got right are Kjeldahl, Hohenzollern, juamave, groenedael, zindiq and euchologion.
Twitter, of course, exploded with tweets, vines and videos congratulating the two boys.
If you are wondering, what is being talked about here, watch this:
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