Mediaboss Marketing

The longest Tri-State Spelling Bee in collective memory ended Saturday afternoon in a spell-off between last years spelling champion and a fifth-grade challenger.

Aaron Manning won the bee with the word crocuses, which are bulbs, plants or blooms of a large genus of perennial herbs widely cultivated for their solitary long-tubed flowers.

Im a pretty good speller, Manning said, standing with his parents, siblings and friends in Vectren Auditorium at Ivy Tech Community College while holding his enormous first-place trophy with both hands.

This is the eighth-grade Plaza Park International Prep Academy students second consecutive year winning the Evansville Courier & Press Tri-State Bee; and it will be his second time representing the area in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C.

It was not an easy victory.

The spell-a-thon went 18 rounds, with the judges actually skipping five pages of the official bee word list to get to the more difficult options: raconteur, fraulein, gnathonic, mnemonic, pickelhaube, voortrekker.

I didnt know what the words meant, said second-place winner Charu Jain, a fifth grader at J.L. Buford Intermediate Educational Center in Mount Vernon, Ill. I always ask if theres an alternate pronunciation. Like, I thought patently was spelled pattonly at first, then I heard the other pronunciation.

She smiled, clutching her bright blue, second place trophy. She had spelled patently right, and several words after it, but was knocked out eventually by the word condescension.

Jain qualified for the Tri-State competition this year after she won her schools spelling bee, along with other 155 school spelling bee champions from 29 counties in the Tri-State area. Her goal was simply to qualify for the oral bee. (Students take a written spelling test Saturday morning to qualify for the afternoon event.)

Her competition was an eighth-grader, Jains father, Vipin Jain, said. We are very proud of her.

More:
Aaron Manning endures to win marathon Tri-State Spelling Bee | PHOTOS