Like most sixth-graders, Tanay Patri doesn’t know how to use “impugnable” in a sentence.
But definitions and diction didn’t matter Saturday afternoon, as the McCallie School student spelled that word and 14 more to win the 2010 Chattanooga Times Free Press Regional Spelling Bee.
The win was Tanay’s second straight championship. He will travel to Washington, D.C., in June to compete in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.
“I felt on top of the world, but the kids who finished right behind me all have equal potential,” he said. “Sometimes it’s the luck of the draw.”
Tanay said he improved his own luck by practicing about two hours every day for 10 months.
“Instead of getting an extra half hour of sleep I’ll probably stay on the computer doing spelling and stuff,” he said.
Those hours won him $500 in spending money, a $100 savings bond, an encyclopedia subscription and a new dictionary, but he said his current habits need improvement for the national stage.
“I have to really get my act together,” he said. “You just go through the dictionary and look at every word you can possibly think of.”
Tanay bested 100 other students, ranging from third- to eighth-graders.
“I probably started when I was 6 years old,” he said. “You have to keep trying at the same thing, that’s basically why I have an edge over them as far as experience.”
Tanay said he misses one activity that spelling competitions prohibit.
“I’ll get to go outside and play a little bit more after the national spelling bee for a month or two,” he said, “but it’ll be back to studying after that.”
According to Garry Grimes, head of Newspapers in Education with the Times Free Press, 500 words were on the official list to be used for the regional bee. About 300 came from a study guide given to competitors, and 200 words could be anything else in the dictionary.
“It still surprises me that these kids can spell these words,” he said. “You can remember 1,000 words or so from a photographic memory, but every word is fair game.”
First runner-up Evan Spence, a sixth-grader from Hickory Valley Christian School, described the final round and kept an optimistic outlook for next year.
“I was shaking, I was so nervous,” he said. “But I plan on studying little by little in the offseason the whole time so I can advance and get better.”