Erik Williams of Clay County, a sixth grader at St. Johns Country Day School, won the First Coast Spelling Bee on Tuesday night.
Williams came out on top of 13 middle and elementary school students from other counties after correctly spelling the word “dalliance.”
“I’m just so happy that I won,” Williams said after the 75th annual First Coast Spelling Bee, hosted by our partner News4Jax.
The sixth grader said he spent a lot of time preparing for Tuesday night’s event.
“You study a lot of etymology to figure out language patterns,” he explained.
Williams said he got lucky a few times because many of the words he was asked to spell were derived from Latin - a language that he studies. “Because there are Latin nouns and Latin verbs that some English words are derived from,” he said.
He thanked his mom, giving her a lot of credit for his success.
“She was basically the one that got me motivated to do all this,” he said. “She quizzed me on the words. She helped me through this whole thing.”
In addition to all the studying he did, Williams said he went into the competition with a strategy - ask as many questions as possible.
“It helps to ask the questions and just slow the word down,” he said. “The questions help to figure out part of the words. Definition can help. Language of origin, definitely.”
Now Williams will begin preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee in May. It will take place in National Harbor, Maryland, right across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
What does Williams most want to do while he’s in the nation’s capital?
“Well, I’m a huge baseball fan,” he said. “So I want to go a Washington Nationals game there.”
Full video coverage of the First Coast Spelling Bee can be found at News4Jax.com.
Brendan Rivers can be reached at brivers@wjct.org, 904-358-6396 or on Twitter at @BrendanRivers.
