Carnage 8th-grader wins Wake spelling bee

Rohan Sachdev, an eighth-grader at Carnage Magnet Middle School, won the PAGE of Wake County Spelling Bee on Saturday, earning an all-expense paid trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee outside Washington, D.C.

Rohan, 13, competed in the national bee in 2015, when he tied for 39th place out of about 280 spellers.

Rohan beat out 87 spellers from public, private, parochial, magnet, home and charters schools Saturday in a spellathon that began in the morning and ended about 3:30 p.m.

Rohan’s winning word was “comarca,” an administrative unit in Latin American countries.

Seventh-grader Akshar Yeccherla, 13, of Mills Park Middle School came in second place after misspelling “esbat,” which is a meeting of a coven of witches.

The third-place winner was Lindsay Lopez, a 13-year-old seventh-grader from Moore Square Museum Magnet Middle School. She went down on “duende,” a word that refers to the power to attract through personal magnetism and charm.

Rohan also correctly spelled “venial,” “rosemaling” and “gradgrind.” Other words in the final rounds were splacknuck, benzoin, sondage, retablo, colchicum, devonian, farad, scaphoid, billon and sabreur.

This story was originally published March 18, 2017 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Carnage 8th-grader wins Wake spelling bee."