Harini Logan

Some Lesser Known Facts About Harini Logan

• Harini Logan is an Indian-American girl who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee 2022.

• In 2013, when Harini was in first grade, she was first intrigued by the Scripps National Spelling Bee after she watched it with her family on the TV.

• She started her journey as a speller with NSF Regional Spelling Bee when she was in second grade.

• She grew up actively participating in numerous extra-curriculum activities. Harini presented a project on France at a Multicultural fair at her school.

  

• She has been participating in the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2018 when she secured 323rd place. In 2019, she secured 30th place, and in 2021 she secured 31st place.

• In 2019, she won the San Antonio Express News Regional Spelling Bee second time in a row.

  

• She secured second place in the 2020 Canada-USA International Spelling Bee Championship. She became WishWin’s 2021 Senior Spellathon First Runner-up.

  

• On 27 March 2021, Logan won the Brauntex Bee Regional Spelling Competition at the Brauntex Theatre

• On 3 June 2022, she secured the first position in the Scripps National Spelling Bee by defeating Vikram Raju in the bee’s first-ever lightning-round tiebreaker at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Oxon Hill. The eighth-grader correctly spelt 22 words in the spell-off during the competition with ‘moorhen’ being her final winning word. The final two competitors, Vikram Raju and Harini Logan, had been facing difficulty in spelling their words between rounds 13 and 18 when the jury decided to institute a 90 seconds spell-off. It was decided that the contestant who would spell as many words as possible correctly would win the show. Logan spelt 22 words correctly as compared to Raju who spelt only 15 words. Besides awards from Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica, Logan received a cash prize of $50,000 and a Scripps Cup.

  

• Harini was eliminated and then reinstated during the Scripps National Spelling Bee. During the vocabulary round of the competetion, Harini defined the word “pullulation” as the nesting of mating birds. Initially, her answer was considered wrong as the jury asserted that the correct answer was the swarming of bees. Later, head judge Mary Brooks said,
  

  We did a little sleuthing after you finished, which is what our job is, to make sure we’ve made the right decision. We did a little deep dive in that word and actually the answer you gave to that word is considered correct, so we’re going to reinstate you.”

  It was her spelling bee coaches Walters and Navneeth who rushed to the judges, along with Harini’s mom, Priya, as soon as Harini walked off the stage in the vocabulary round. Thereafter, she breezed into the finals against Vikram.

• A few words that contributed to Logan’s win are ‘sereh’—a fragrant grass of southern Asia, ‘charadriiform’—of or relating to an order of birds including the shorebirds, auks, gulls, and ‘ditalini’—short elbow-shaped pieces of macaroni.

• For the competition, she received training from renowned spelling bee coach Grace Walters, a resident of Texas and a student at Rice University.

• While talking about the lightning round, which was introduced a few months before the competition, Logan said,
  

  When it got introduced last year, I was a bit terrified, to be honest..I go slow. That’s my thing. I didn’t know how I would fare in that setting.”

• A voracious reader since childhood, her love for books led her to compete in spelling bee competitions.

• She is a skilled musician and plays the piano, the recorder and the ukulele.

• She is an avid dog lover and owns a Cavapoo dog named Milo.

• She is also fond of creative writing and is planning on publishing a book sometime in high school.

• Kamala Harris, the first Indian-origin US Vice-President, is Logan’s inspiration.

• She is also fond of playing Tennis.