‘Toxophilite’ wins Sacramento spelling bee for Roseville 8th-grader. Next up, Washington

Some calm and collected, others bouncing with nerves or adrenaline, 64 of Northern California’s top young spellers took the floor Tuesday morning at Golden 1 Center in search of glory.

Eighteen rounds, 452 words and five hours later, it was 14-year-old Megan Lynch from St. Albans Country Day School in Roseville left standing as winner of the California Central Valley Spelling Bee, the 37th edition of the annual contest presented by The Sacramento Bee.

Lynch sealed her victory by spelling “toxophilite.” Definition: One fond of or an expert in archery. Origin: Word is from Greek derived elements. Other pronunciations: None listed.

Lynch beamed confidently before tracing the letters on the back of her participants’ badge before enunciating the word’s corresponding letters.

Lynch attributed her victory to her classmates, teachers, online lessons and coaching, as well as her affection for reading science fiction. Lynch’s mother and spelling coach, Shalini, said that the last word was fitting considering her sister’s position on an archery team, where her father, Braden, has a role as an instructor.

“She loves to read and I think that helps,” Shalini said. “Good readers make good spellers because they get exposed to a lot of words. I think most good spellers start with an affinity for spelling, but then they really have to work at it to get to this level.”

As pronouncer Bob Nathan read off hundreds of words, first at a fairly brisk pace, the pack of fourth- through eighth-grade students – more than half from Sacramento County schools – took turns at the microphone, spelling their responses with care while the blue trophy rested directly in front of them, awaiting the champion.

The degree of difficulty increased considerably by the competition’s second round, which opened with back-to-back eliminations. Then, minutes later, an unforgiving run of “sieve,” “antithesis,” “gluttonous,” “narcoleptic” and “laconic” knocked out five consecutive spellers.

Fairly commonplace words like “irritability” and “utilitarian” in the first round gave way to the likes of “beelzebub,” “rhabdoid,” “googol,” “quidnunc,” “turophile” (defined by Nathan as a “cheese fancier”) and “tomalley” (the liver of a lobster) by the third round or later, which followed an hour lunch break.

Following her victory, Lynch offered up her own advice for those who aspire to improve their spelling.

“Nobody’s really naturally good at anything. You just sort of have to study it and do more of patterns and roots than memorization, because one root can get you say, like 10 words and memorizing can get you like two if there’s an adjective and a noun form,” Lynch said. “In languages, particularly Latin and Greek, the other words get assimilated by English and morphed to form new words, so they tend to retain some of their spellings, so if you know what word it comes from in a different language, you know how to spell it in English.”

Lynch moves on to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, held late May in Washington, D.C, in addition to a personal trophy and one for St. Albans. Lynch also wins a one-year subscription to both Britannica Online Premium and the Merriam Webster Unabridged Online dictionary.

Last year’s regional spelling bee ended on a controversial note, when it was discovered that a new rule had been implemented erroneously, requiring then-eighth-grader Samhita Kumar to spell one more word than should have been necessary, which resulted in Logan Swain of Arden Middle School, also in eighth grade, winning the spelling bee.

Kumar in 2019 was the only speller in the seventh round to correctly spell a word (“coterie,” which also appeared in Tuesday’s competition and was spelled correctly) and followed it up by successfully spelling “piupiu,” but the spelling bee continued with another word, “Mapuche,” which she missed. Swain was eventually declared champion instead after he correctly spelling three consecutive words, when the rules also stated he only needed to spell the first two.

The rule was implemented correctly in the championship round of Tuesday’s contest.

To reconcile the mistake, The Sacramento Bee elected to send both Swain and Kumar to the Scripps National Spelling Bee last year, and Tuesday’s program listed both Kumar and Swain as co-champions for 2019, the only year on the list with multiple winners. Kumar, a former student of Churchill Middle School in Carmichael, also won the regional contest in 2017 and 2018.