Zaila Avant-garde, 14, has become the first African-American to win the 90-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee. Get more on this story:
She is the first black contestant to win since Jody-Anne Maxwell of Jamaica in 1998, also the only international winner.Zaila won the event by correctly spelling Murraya - a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees
She even thought of MacNolia Cox, who in 1936 became the first black finalist at the bee and wasn't allowed to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the contestants.Many top Scripps spellers start competing when they are of nursery age. Zaila only started a few years ago, after her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the competition on TV and realised his daughter's affinity for doing complicated maths in her head could translate well to spelling.
"She really just had a much different approach than any speller I've ever seen. She basically knew the definition of every word that we did, like pretty much verbatim. She knew, not just the word but the story behind the word, why every letter had to be that letter and couldn't be anything else.
Chaitra Thummala, 12, of San Francisco, came in second after misspelling neroli oil, but still took home $25,000 .
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