The last word, after hundreds of competitors fell to some of the dictionary’s most colorful monsters, was “Murraya.”

When Zaila Avant-garde, 14, spelled it correctly on Thursday night, she put her hands to her head, beamed and twirled her way through confetti and into spelling history, as the first Black American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The victory gave an extra polish to Zaila’s already remarkable résumé: Not only has she competed in spelling bees for two years, she already holds three Guinness world records for dribbling, bouncing and juggling basketballs. All before the ninth grade.

“Now I get to get a nice trophy, which is the best part of any win,” she said in an interview on ESPN, which broadcast the contest. (She also won a $50,000 prize.)

On Friday morning, she told “Good Morning America” that she hoped to see more African American students “doing well in the Scripps Spelling Bee” in a few years.

The bee, she said, was a “gate-opener to being interested in education.”

Zaila’s journey from her hometown near New Orleans to the spelling bee finals in Orlando, Fla., spanned two years, 18 rounds of competition and tens of thousands of words she pored over with her father.

On Thursday night, she faced not only a battery of obscure words — fidibus, ancistroid and depreter among others — but new spelling bee rules enacted after eight students were crowned co-champions in 2019. (The bee was canceled last year because of pandemic concerns.)

Ever tougher words

The national spelling bee has been held for almost 100 years, and for decades, its organizers have steadily made the words more difficult, veering into the realms of medicine, art, zoology and antiquity. But students have consistently matched them.

Bee organizers imposed new rules this year, including a live vocabulary round, saying they wanted to challenge the skills of spellers who could exhaust their list of challenging words and endure marathon, four-hour contests like the one in 2019.

This year’s words were especially difficult, said Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and the author of “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.”

“I have the dictionary open in front of me, and I edited this dictionary, and I have not spelled any of these words right on the first try,” she said at one point on Thursday night.

And it did not take long for most of the 11 finalists to stumble. Words that foiled spellers included chrysal, athanor, cloxacillin, heliconius, torticollis, platylepadid and gewgaw, and at one point judges had to review a video replay to determine whether a speller said the letter I or Y. (He misspelled “ambystoma.”)

Several spellers were eliminated in a round of questions about word meanings, which Ms. Stamper said was a return to spelling bees’ origin as a broader vocabulary exercise. “It wasn’t this gamified thing that we do now,” she said.

In the last few minutes of competition, it came down to two girls, Zaila and Chaitra Thummala, a 12-year-old from San Francisco.

The last few words were rattled off in a swift back-and-forth between them and the pronouncer.

The final duel

First was “fewtrils” (things of little value), which Chaitra got right. Then “retene” (a chemical isolated especially from pine tar, rosin oil and various fossil resins), which Zaila spelled correctly.

And finally “neroli oil” (a fragrant pale yellow essential oil). Chaitra got that wrong, exchanging the O in “neroli” for an E.

That gave Zaila a chance to win it all with one more correct word.

At first, she seemed flummoxed by her word, “Murraya,” grimacing a little. The pronouncer told her it meant a genus of tropical Asiatic and Australian trees having pinnate leaves with imbricated petals.

“Does this word contain like the English word ‘Murray,’ which would be the name of a comedian?” Zaila asked, referring to the actor Bill Murray and drawing laughs from the pronouncer and the judges.

She began to spell it, stopped herself, and asked for the language of origin (Latin from a Swedish name).

Then, as with so many words before, she needed little time to solve its structure. She spelled the word correctly.

A new speller, longtime record-holder

Unlike some of the other competitors, who train for years and treat spelling bees as a family enterprise, Zaila had competed for only two years.

Her victory was celebrated on social media by the likes of the first lady, Jill Biden, who attended the bee; former President Barack Obama; and Bernice King, the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (The first Black winner was Jody-Anne Maxwell, a 12-year-old from Jamaica, who won the bee in 1998.)

Zaila was also the first student from Louisiana to win the bee, and was hailed by Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans. “Talk about #blackgirlmagic!” she said on Twitter. “We’re all so proud of you!!”

Like many past winners, Zaila attributed her win, in part, to luck of the words she drew. One of the few that rattled her on Thursday was “nepeta,” a genus of herbs. It was a word that Zaila said she had struggled with before.

“I got it this time,” Zaila said after her win.

Zaila, who just finished eighth grade in Harvey, La., showed a prowess for spelling at 10, when her father, who had been watching the national bee, asked her how to spell the winning word: marocain.

Zaila spelled it perfectly. Then, he asked her to spell the winning words going back to 1999. She spelled nearly all of them correctly and was able to tell him the books where she had seen them.

“He was a bit surprised by that,” Zaila said in an interview before the finals.

But she did not start competing until two years ago, when she asked her parents if she could try a regional spelling bee. In the 2019 national tournament, she was tripped up by “vagaries” in the third round.

Zaila, whose father changed her surname from Heard to Avant-garde in homage to the jazz great John Coltrane, has for years found other avenues of success.

A gifted basketball player, she holds three Guinness world records, for the most basketballs dribbled simultaneously (six basketballs for 30 seconds); the most basketball bounces (307 bounces in 30 seconds); and the most bounce juggles in one minute (255 using four basketballs).

In 2018, she appeared in a commercial that showcased her skills alongside the N.B.A. star Stephen Curry. She also learned how to divide five-digit numbers by two-digit numbers in her head, a skill she said she has a hard time explaining.

“It’s like asking a millipede how they walk with all those legs,” said Zaila, who has three younger brothers.

Winning the bee became her next goal.