At National Bee, kids vie to be US best speller

If Keiko Bridwell ever comes across a thylacine, she's likely to throttle it because the carnivorous marsupial from Tasmania got her kicked out of the final of the US National Spelling Bee.

"I spelled it with an 'o' instead of an 'a,'" Bridwell, who was one of a record 293 children aged nine to 15 who had come to Washington Thursday for a shot at the title of Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion and 30,000 dollar prize.

Most of the spellers were from the United States, but teens and tweens had also come from China for the first time, as well as the Bahamas, Ghana, Guam, and South Korea.

Not all those who gathered in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington to spell words most people will never use in their lifetime -- in front of an audience that included Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden -- were native English speakers.

More than half were boys, but the eventual winner after a long night of brain-wracking, emotion and rather obscure words was Kavya Shivashankar from Kansas, a 13-year-old girl of Indian origin who wants to be a neurosurgeon when she grows up.

Shivashankar wrote each word on her hand, including the one that won her the competition, "Laodicean," which means lukewarm or indifferent especially in religion or politics, as she spelled it out for the official pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, an American professor of Latin and ancient Greek who is fluent in French and German.

Bailly challenged the spellers, as competitors are called, with the names of cheeses like Neufchatel and Caerphilly; musical terms like "passacaglia" and "goombay;" parts of the anatomy such as "iliopsoas," and more.

He read out French words from "baignoire" to "becquerel" to "grisaille" that have slid over into English; German- and Bantu-origin words, Latin- and Greek-origin words; pronouncing them all with a thick American accent.

"This country is made up of people of so many different nationalities, and all of them brought their languages here," said Barry Bridwell, Keiko's father.

"That's what makes the English language and this competition so difficult," he said.

The contestants could repeat the word, ask what part of speech it is, what its origins are, what it means, and whether it has any alternative pronunciations.

"A lot of people ask us how we choose the words but we like to keep that a mystery," said Lee Rose, spokeswoman for Scripps.

Even though many of the words sounded remarkably foreign, all can be found in Webster's Third New International dictionary, the official reference book of the competition, she said.

Then, starting from the moment a word passed the lips of the pronouncer, the speller had a total of two and a half minutes to spell it correctly.

Success meant a competitor went on to the next round; failure brought a "ding" sound, and they had to leave center stage and go over to the loving embrace of their proud parents.

Kennyi Aouad, 13, who is in eighth grade in Indiana, was dinged after slipping up on "Palatschinken," the Austrian or southern German name for crepes.

Ramya Auroprem, exited over another German-origin word, "Fackeltanz," a dance -- literally a torch dance -- often performed at weddings.

A Breton word, "menhir," meaning an upright monumental stone, stumped one of the final three, Aishwarya Pastapur from Illinois. She got the "h" and the "i" in the wrong order.

The youngest finalist, 12-year-old Tim Ruiter from Virginia, who was also the only home-schooled youngster in the finals, had prepared for the competition by studying some 10,000 index cards on which he had printed out words that he knew he had to work on, his father John told AFP.

He was stumped by "maecenas," a generous sponsor or patron who was arguably less than generous with Ruiter.

But the boy for whom second grade teachers used to prepare a separate list of vocabulary words because he already knew all the words his peers were just learning, vowed to be back next year for the 83rd Scripps National Spelling Bee, a competition which remains as popular in the age of spell checkers as it was when it first began in 1925.