Anamika Veeramani

Latest news about Anamika Veeramani: Anamika Veeramani started studying in September for this moment. The 12-year-old would have started sooner, but she spent the summer working on her science fair project.

On Saturday afternoon, after more than three hours of competition, the seventh-grader at Incarnate Word Academy in Parma Heights correctly spelled “olivaceous” to win the Plain Dealer Cuyahoga County Scripps Spelling Bee.

She knew the word, which has Greek, Latin and French origins and means olive-green. She learned it, plus 17 rounds of other obscure words, by reading books and examining the list from the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

That was the goal of the 63 students at the Cuyahoga bee: to travel to Washington, D.C., to compete May 26.

But if they were nervous on the stage — their feet swinging, knees knocking, hands fidgeting in their laps — their parents and coaches were worse.

Through “keest” and “sauerbraten” and “kibei,” they jotted lists in their notebooks, whispering “That was easy,” or “Yes!”

Some threw up their hands in the hushed auditorium, as if to say “What the heck?” to words they’d never heard of.

Like kibei. The child of Japanese immigrants who is born in North or South America and educated largely in Japan, of course.

“It’s really something to see such smart brains in such little bodies,” said Rashaunda Smith of Euclid, whose son, Darsheed Mustafa, came in fifth.

His mistake, said his mom, was that he didn’t ask for more pronunciations of “ingenue.”

That’s a must, said Anamika’s coach, Janice Hearst. It allows spellers to relax, regroup and picture the word in their minds. Runner-up Spencer Weiss, an eighth-grader at Ballard Brady Middle School in the Orange district, couldn’t correctly picture “pentapody.”

“It was pretty hard. I hadn’t heard of the last couple of words,” said Spencer, whose teacher remembers him as a second-grader, lying in the hallway writing homonyms on a scroll of paper several classrooms long.

Spencer taught his first-grade classmates how to spell “onomatopoeia,” said his parents. He’s always loved words.