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Category: Language Patterns

WishWin Spelling Bee Results

WishWin Spelling Bee Results

The WishWin Spellathon 2019 sponsored by SpelPundit was held at The University of Texas at Dallas on Dec 7th. The event was filled with many enthusiastic spellers. Both young and senior spellers had a chance to interact with Scripps National Spelling Bee champion (2018) and co-champions (2019), Karthik Nemmani, Sohum Sukhatankar, and Rohan Raja!

Here is the list of top spellers of Senior and Junior spelling bee category:

Senior Spellathon Winners:

Champion: Michael Kolagani (Austin, TX)
1st Runner-up: Vivinsha Veduru (Keller, TX)
2nd Runner-up: Shijay Sivakumar (Midland, TX)

Junior Spellathon Winners:

Champion: Arnesh Jayaram (Allen, TX)
1st Runner-up: Anirudh Kidambi (Frisco, TX)
2nd Runner-up: Siyonamithra Kandala (San Antonio, TX)
4th Place: Darsheel Paila (Dallas, TX)

The top spellers received gift vouchers of $500, $300, and $200 from SpellPundit!

Kudos to the entire team of WishWin for organizing such a great event for good cause!

WishWin is a Non-Profit Organization. WishWin’s mission is to promote academic excellence through contests, and also help underprivileged children.

Indo-European Languages

Indo-European Languages

There are about 470,000 words in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. These words come from over 10,000 languages. The English language belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. As you can see in the map (Source: Western Oregon University) below, Indo-European languages are spoken all over the world. Because all of these languages came from one common language, you will see many similarities between words of different origins. You will also see many words in the dictionary that may have come from Sanskrit, then went into Norwegian, then into Old English.

The Indo-European language family (Source: The Human Mosaic, 10th Edition) is divided into many sub-groups, including Greek, Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Indic, Iranic, etc.

Many of the words that are asked in spelling bees come from this language family. Because the Indo-European language family makes up a high percentage of all the words in the dictionary, it is useful to learn the language patterns for all of these languages.

You will also see many words asked at spelling bees that come from languages that aren’t in the Indo-European family such as Austro-Asiatic, Finno-Ugric, Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian, etc. We will discuss these language families in another post.