The Latest: 14-year-old Texan wins National Spelling Bee
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The Latest on the Scripps National Spelling Bee (all times local):
10:45 p.m.
Fourteen-year-old Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, Texas, has won the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
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Karthik spelled the word "koinonia" correctly to become the champion late Thursday. He also spelled "haecceitas" correctly after seventh-grader Naysa Modi from Frisco, Texas, missed the word "Bewusstseinslage" in the final round.
The champion of the 93-year-old competition will receive more than $42,000 in cash and prizes.
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8:30 p.m.
The 16 remaining spellers in the Scripps National Spelling Bee are back on stage and ready to continue spelling until a champion emerges.
That's a record number of spellers for the prime-time finals, and it could mean a late-night finish to a longer-than-usual week. The size of this year's bee field nearly doubled from prior years because of a new wild-card program. Four of the remaining spellers got in via wild cards.
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The bee ended in a tie for three consecutive years from 2014-2016, but that almost certainly won't happen this year because the 16 finalists all took a written tiebreaker test.
The champion of the 93-year-old competition will receive more than $42,000 in cash and prizes.
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3 p.m.
Sixteen accomplished spellers have advanced to the prime-time finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, an unusually high number after a morning session that lasted 4½ hours.
The finals began with 41 spellers, and the number slowly dwindled over five rounds, but there was never a mass exodus from the stage. At one point in the second round, 21 consecutive kids spelled their words correctly.
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Three spellers who made the top 10 last year still have a chance to repeat that accomplishment: Erin Howard, Naysa Modi and Shruthika Padhy.
Tara Singh, making her fifth and final appearance in the bee, will go to the prime-time finals for the first time.
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9 a.m.
The dramatic final rounds of the Scripps National Spelling Bee are set to begin.
Forty-one spellers advanced to Thursday's finals out of a field of 516 — by far the largest in the 93-year history of the competition. Scripps started a wild-card program this year that created a path to nationals for spellers who didn't win their regional bees, and some of the finalists got to the bee that way.
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The past 13 champions and 18 of the last 22 have been Indian-American, and that trend could easily continue. Most of the consensus favorites in this year's bee have Indian heritage.