OXON HILL, Md.—Harini Logan kept trying to learn from her near-misses in online spelling bees. Recognized for years as one of the best spellers in the English language, she had never taken home a national title.
In the biggest bee of them all, she endured a new series of setbacks, but somehow, at the end, she was still there.
Harini was eliminated, then reinstated, during the Scripps National Spelling Bee’s much-debated multiple-choice vocabulary round. She misspelled four times as Scripps’ most challenging words proved too much for her and Vikram Raju, who also got four wrong in the closing stretch. And then she finally took down Vikram in the bee’s first-ever lightning-round tiebreaker on Thursday night….