‘Pinnate’; Student from Deerfield’s Shepard Middle School qualifies for Scripps National Spelling Bee with ‘exhilarating’ regional title win
Daphne Gil didn’t expect to be the last speller standing at the podium Thursday night.
The eighth grader from Alan. B. Shepard Middle School in Deerfield felt fortunate to be among 12 contestants at the Regional Spelling Bee in Vernon Hills, and “never would’ve imagined” what she spelled into reality.
After nearly 20 rounds of precision spelling and no missteps, Gil won the Lake County Regional Spelling Bee and booked herself a trip to the Washington, D.C. area in late May as a contestant in the renowned Scripps National Spelling Bee.
“Exhilarating, it’s so exciting,” Gil said, holding her trophy as proud family members looked on.
“I only really got into it this year because I got lucky in the class bee,” she said. “And then I developed my own study skills. So they really carried me. They made me successful in the school one, in the sectional one and now.”
Winning was no easy feat. The competition drew skilled spellers from around Lake County, who qualified by finishing in the top four in three area sectionals after winning their school and classroom competitions.
Gil said she poured in “so much work” after winning her classroom competition, and it showed, as she and runner-up Sharanya Saha from Aptakisic-Tripp Junior High in Buffalo Grove demonstrated successfully spelled word after word.
Ian Leong of Cotton Creek School in Island Lake and Debarghya Das of Hawthorn Middle School South in Vernon Hills each spelled 16 words correctly and finished as the next runners up, while Tejaaswini Karthick of Woodland Middle School in Gurnee finished in fifth after making it to round 15.
The area’s top wordsmiths put their sportsmanship on display, too, as Saha flashed a friendly smile and told Gil she did a great job while the two posed for post-competition photos.
Lake County Regional Superintendent of Schools Michael Karner said it was a point of pride for the Regional Office of Education to host the area’s competitions, which had 70 participating schools.
“Seeing this go on and being able to offer this continually to Lake County, it brings a lot of joy,” Karner said.
Gil, who is also fluent in Hebrew, has already scoured the Scripps’ sprawling word list for countless hours. But plenty more studying is in the cards between now and when she’ll make her first trip out to see the nation’s capital.
“I’ve gone through the whole list and I feel pretty confident with the words on the list, but I want to brush up on my word parts,” she said. “So I want to learn more of those. And I also want to learn my different patterns and languages because those really help you if you don’t know the word.”
She won on “pinnate,” a word of Latin origin which, according to Merriam-Webster, means, “resembling a feather especially in having similar parts arranged on opposite sides of an axis like the barbs on the rachis of a feather.”
Gil rattled off each word she was challenged with, sometimes showing a hint of a smile, as her fellow spellers began to dwindle in numbers, though they hung in their longer than many adults would have against the likes of “bibliopegist,” “odiferous” and “grandiloquent.”
“I thought it was a pretty fierce competition,” Gil said. “I thought everybody had an equal chance. I felt I had just as good a chance as everyone else did, and everyone tried their best.”
“It’s amazing; we are so proud of Daphne,” her mother Alona Ramati said. “She’s such a hard worker and she’s really smart, so we’re very proud of her.”
