What was the 2017 Scripps National Spelling Bee winning word?
If you missed out on Thursday night’s finals, 12-year-old Ananya Vinay came away with a big win in the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee with a word you’ve likely never heard of.
After a nearly 40-minute back-and-forth with runner-up Rohan Rajeev, Vinay successfully spelled her final word to end the win.
The victory earned Vinay more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.
So what was the big word?
Vinay won the competition with the word “marocain,” a french word meaning “a dress fabric of ribbed crepe, made of silk or wool or both.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8rsMwzMYG8
This was the first time since 2013 that the competition did not end in a tie.
How does Vinay’s winning word stack up? A list of the winning words in the Scripps National Spelling Bee from the past ten years can be seen below:
| 2008 | guerdon | Sameer Mishra | West Lafayette, Indiana | ||
| 2009 | Laodicean | Kavya Shivashankar | Olathe, Kansas | ||
| 2010 | stromuhr | Anamika Veeramani | Cleveland, Ohio | ||
| 2011 | cymotrichous | Sukanya Roy | Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania | ||
| 2012 | guetapens | Snigdha Nandipati | San Diego, California | ||
| 2013 | knaidel | Arvind Mahankali | New York City | ||
| 2014 | stichomythia | Sriram J. Hathwar | Corning, New York | ||
| feuilleton | Ansun Sujoe | Fort Worth, Texas | |||
| 2015 | scherenschnitte | Vanya Shivashankar | Olathe, Kansas | ||
| nunatak | Gokul Venkatachalam | St. Louis, Missouri | |||
| 2016 | Feldenkrais | Jairam Hathwar | Corning, New York | ||
| gesellschaft | Nihar Sai Reddy Janga | Austin, Texas | |||
| 2017 | marocain | Ananya Vinay | Fresno, California |
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