Stellar Speller : Dana Point 12-Year-Old Keeps Her Cool and Wins Top Honors in County Bee

COSTA MESA — A year of long nights studying the dictionary paid off for 12-year-old Shivani R. Kadakia of Dana Point, who became Orange County’s reigning champ of spelling Saturday after a day of tackling such difficult words as “murmuration” and “soliloquy.”

Shivani, the daughter of two doctors who immigrated from India 14 years ago, was poised and solemn throughout the tiring daylong spelling bee at the Orange County Department of Education, which began with 80 hopeful students from sixth to eighth grade.

In the end, it was the obscure but deceptively simple-sounding word “verdure” that knocked her final competitor, Soloman Chao, out of the running and gave her the chance to win a trip to Washington, D.C., in late May for the National Spelling Bee. That she did, by spelling “dubiety”--which, by the way, is another way of saying “doubtfulness.”

The moment the bell rang to signal her win, Shivani’s father, Rajesh J. Kadakia, leaped to his feet and ran to podium to give his daughter a huge and very public hug. “Gee Dad,” she said later, as television cameras rolled, “you didn’t have to embarrass me.”

At the same time, she gave her parents credit for helping coach her to the championship, throwing words at her weekends and evenings, and correcting her mistakes despite their own limitations with the spoken English language.

“I really have to thank two people,” she said, suddenly shy and soft-spoken after leaving the podium. “My third-grade teacher, who always made me do a bonus word at the end of her spelling tests because she said I was a good speller, and my mom, who found an ad for a private spelling bee a few years ago and signed me up.”

Shivani, now an eighth-grader at the private St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, eventually won the national championship of that private contest, run by the North South Foundation, an organization of East Indian professionals. Her brother, Neil, 10, is also a champion speller.

Darshana R. Kadakia, Shivani’s mother and a pulmonary specialist, said she hired a tutor when Shivani was 5 years old to teach her daughter proper English pronunciation by reading to her daily. That created in Shivani a love of books, she said.

“She’s a very avid reader, of school books and others,” said Shivani’s mother. “She knows all the Indian mythological stories inside out.”

The top five finalists were Solomon Chao of Sowers Middle School; Jennifer Liu of Brea Country Hills Elementary School; Patrick Ng of S.S. Simon and Jude School; Amit Lakhanpal of Edgewood School; and Lise Phan of McGarvin Intermediate School.