Tricky words flew in the Idylwild Elementary School cafeteria as 39 elementary and middle school students from 36 Alachua County schools competed for the title of the district’s top speller for three hours on Wednesday. 

After a one-on-one battle between the Frazer School’s Armaan Vora and homeschooler Cooper Campen, lasting 34 rounds over the course of about an hour, Campen emerged victorious. 

Campen, a 13-year-old seventh grader, has been spelling competitively for three years now and won last year’s district spelling bee. 

“I’m really excited, because I worked really, really hard this year,” Campen said in an interview. “There were a lot of really tough kids to beat this year, and it’s all a game of who gets the word, because you could get one word that you’ve never heard before, and then the next person could… one that you might have known before.” 

By the fifth round, the Alachua County Public Schools District Spelling Bee pool had narrowed to five students: Lincoln Middle School’s Jeevan George, Millhopper Montessori School’s Dahlia Teitelbaum, Kanapaha Middle School’s Maya Zielinski, Campen and Vora. 

Teitelbaum went out in Round 6 on the word “contrariwise.” Zielinski missed “fecund” in Round 7, and George fell out in Round 8 on “ancillary.” 

For 34 more rounds, Campen and Vora cycled through word after word without error. 

In Round 40, the competitors moved into the 3B section of the Words of the Champions word list. This section contains the hardest words, including bobolink, chorten and the word which took Vora out of the competition in Round 42: “concatenate.” 

Campen said he was a little nervous when the spellers reached 3B, because he only knows 40-50% of the words on that portion of the list, but the words he was given were all ones he had studied, including the final, winning word: “epistemology.” 

A voracious reader since he was 3 years old, Campen built a strong vocabulary from his books and natural interests. For example, he knows how to spell “cairn” because he has studied wilderness survival and knows how a stack of rocks could help indicate your location to rescuers. 

But after being eliminated in the third round of his first district spelling bee two years ago, Campen dug into the Words of the Champions list, published by Scripps National Spelling Bee. 

“You can read all the books in the world, but the list is what’s going to tell you exactly what they’ll be saying,” Campen said. 

Many of the words in the One Bee and Two Bee lists were the same as last year’s. Campen said the Words of the Champions list only changes about 20% each year, so he had an advantage from all he had studied last year, leaving him more time to study list 3B. 

Campen will go on to represent Alachua County in the First Coast Regional Spelling Bee, set for March 7 in Jacksonville. The regional winner will advance to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in May in Washington, D.C. 

Campen also won first place for the Lincoln Douglas debate at the Florida Civics and Debate Initiative Northeast Regional Competition on Feb. 15, and will move on to the state championship in April. Though he is homeschooled, Campen competes through Westwood Middle School for debate and robotics clubs.