“Murraya” pronounced “muh-ree-yuh” is the word that earned 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde, whose name is a tribute to jazz musician John Coltrane, the Scripps National Spelling Bee trophy. She is the first African American winner after 96 years of contests.
Avant-garde won in less than two hours managing to maneuver through this year’s new rules, which included multiple-choice vocabulary and a lightning-round tiebreaker. The latter wasn’t necessary.
So what exactly does murraya mean? According to Merriam Webster, murraya is “a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees (family Rutaceae) having pinnate leaves and flowers with imbricated petals.”
Avant-garde was relaxed for most of the spelling bee, including for the winning word. The only word that stumped her was “nepeta”, a genus of mints.
Avant-garde beat runner-up Chaitra Thummala, a 12-year-old from Frisco, Texas and Bhavana Madini, a 13-year-old from Plainview, New York, who finished third.
While most spellers start competing as young as kindergarten, Avant-garde got her start only a few years ago. Her father, Jawara Spacetime, watched the spelling bee on television and came to a realization. His daughter, who would often solve complicated math problems in her head, would also be good at spelling.
After bowing out of the 2019 preliminary rounds, Avant-garde started to take spelling more seriously and began training with private coach, Cole Shafer-Ray, a 20-year-old Yale student and the 2015 Scripps runner-up.
Despite getting a later start and not being well-connected, Avant-garde was able to excel pretty quickly and do something most spellers couldn’t.