It took 19 rounds, but on Jan. 28, Austin Elementary fifth grader Sarv Dharavane won the DeKalb County Spelling Bee, which had been delayed several days because of inclement weather.
The runner up, Adhvik Ravikumar, is a fifth grader at Vanderlyn Elementary. Both schools are located in Dunwoody. The pair competed against 18 other qualifiers in the afternoon competition.
The winning word was “bruxism,” a condition where a person clenches, grinds, or gnashes their teeth either while awake or in their sleep, according to DeKalb County School District officials.
Last year, Dharavane, ran the table over 18 rounds, winning the 63rd Annual Georgia Association of Educators State Spelling Bee without missing a word (including vocabulary).
Dharavane emerged as the 2024 winner of the state title, and, along with runner up Matthew Barber, an eighth grader from Rising Starr Middle, represented Georgia in the Scripps National Spelling Bee Championships in National Harbor, MD.
He and Barber, spelled their way deep in the national competition. Barber fell in the fourth round, and Dharavane made it to the semi-finals.
At the 2024 national competition, Dharavane correctly spelled “motherrumbung,” knew what “reparations” were, nailed “mormorando,” knew how to spell “sagum,” correctly defined what an “ideogram,” was, but “stalace” was his downfall.
He missed “stalace” – a central mass of cells in the root cap of some plants – instead spelling it “stallice.” He ended up tied for 22nd, and vowed after the contest that he would be back.
Rough Draft has reached out to Vanderlyn School officials for comment about Ravikumar’s stellar performance.
