NRI Gayathri Kumar won an Hard English spelling competition 2004
Over 100,000 spellers who took part in school competitions back in September.

LONDON, DECEMBER 07, 2004
NRIpress

NRI, Gayathri Kumar, 13, from Ormskirk, near Liverpool, has been named the first Hard Spell Champion. on Sunday night.

Gayathri's winning words: Accolade, Reimburse, Insatiable, Elevenses, Nyctophobia, Martyr, Odorous, Triennial, Subpoena, Dromedary, Fierce, Papyrus, Graffiti, Deciduous, Apocalypse, Grammatical, Genealogical , Metamorphosis, Intelligent , Troglodyte, Claustrophobia , Geisha , Resuscitate, Disequilibrium , Chihuahua

Gayathri spelt such diverse and difficult words as apocalypse, mezzanine, troglodyte, claustrophobia, geisha and resuscitate to become Britain's best young speller.

Gayathri Kumar
Hard Spell trophy, which was presented to her by BBC ONE's anchorman Eamonn Holmes

Gayathri won a holiday of a lifetime, £5,000 worth of media equipment for her school and the Hard Spell trophy.

"When I arrived at Television Centre I was so tense, I was just numb, and I didn't even think I'd be going through to the finals," Gayathri said.

Five finalists were whittled down from spellers who took part in school competitions back in September.

Gayathri, who is passionate about reading and writing, said, "I really wanted to win Hard Spell because I knew it would make my dad really proud, and I'd like to go on a holiday to somewhere like Russia or Brazil."

Gayathri's top tip for spellers and future Hard Spell contestants is to 'write down the words you get wrong and carry the list around with you, looking at it when you have spare time'.

Headmistress, Miss J Brandreth of Merchant Taylor School for Girls, said: "We're hugely proud of her at school. Gayathri has displayed her characteristic ability to cope under pressure with a natural determination to succeed."

Her dad Suresh's advice on the night was: "Take your time and think about the word, and most of all just enjoy the experience."

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Does spelling really matter?

As Molesworth might have observed, any fule kno it don't. Tony Blair wrote "toomorrow" three times in a memo, Keats once spelled fruit as "furuit", Yeats wrote peculiarities as "peculeraritys", and Hemingway wrote professional as "proffessional". Clearly such mistakes may not help you to be topp in skool, but they don't signify that you are unfit to write great literature or run the world's fourth largest industrial power.
It is true that US vice-president Dan Quayle spelled potato as "potatoe" and David Beckham has a tattoo on his arm in Hindi that misspells his wife's name, but these facts merely add to a general pre-existing picture of the two men being a few letters short of an alphabet, rather than being essential for the argument that each is as dumb as a bag of hair. That said, the person responsible for putting up a banner over a motor-racing track with the word "Finnish" probably wasn't trying to draw attention to the ethnicity of one of the drivers, but inadvertently disclosing their orthographical ineptitude. As was the person who carefully painted the huge letters "SOTP" on the road at a junction. Have any of the above taken the words of AE Housman to heart? Probably not. "Accuracy is a duty," wrote the poet, "not a virtue."