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First of all, Charlotte Walsh didn’t want to get nervous.
“I often think nerves are being written off,” said the 13-year-old from Arlington.
At 9 a.m. Tuesday, she and other young orthographers stepped onto the stage at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor to compete in the 94-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee. The three-day competition attracts students from all over the country and several from abroad. Most are high school age – the limit is eighth grade – but this week there were two 7. Many were first-time qualifiers after winning local and regional bees; others were veterans.
Competitors are given two minutes to write their word and can ask about the meaning, etymology and alternative pronunciation. In Wednesday’s quarterfinals and semifinals, they had to write just one word. The finals will be broadcast live from 8 pm on Thursday on the ION network and on the competition website.
The competition is held entirely in person for the first time since 2019, after interruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Bee did not take place in 2020, and the only personal competitors last year were the 11 finalists.
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This time families, coaches and others sat in National port audiences across the country, friends, relatives, teachers and classmates watched the show live. Two hundred and twenty-nine contestants took to the stage on Tuesday to write a word from a 4,000-word list, answer a question with several word dictionary options from that list, and then write a word that can appear anywhere in Merriam-Webster Non-abbreviated dictionary.
Some competitors responded quickly. Some pulled it out, asking question after question, until the screen behind them turned red, warning that there were only a few seconds left. Their fingers fluttered to scratch invisible words like “ikebana.””“meunière “,” wiliwili “and” obvertend “ in their palms.
A spelling mistake caused the bell to ring: immediate elimination. Proper spelling meant living to write again.
“Does this word contain the Greek prefix mono?, what does “one” mean? “asked 13-year-old Juan Rondo of Florida about mononucleosis” (It happened.)
“Does it come from the Latin” ic “, which means “related to”? 14-year-old Ishan Ramrakiani from Indiana asked about the “ineradicable”” (Yes.)
“Can I get the spelling?” Joked 13-year-old Vikrant Chintanaboyna of California” (Ha ha, no.)
In the huge atrium of the hotel, Charlotte tried to relax with her father and younger brothers. With a brown belt in taekwondo, which is home-trained, she was a racing master from the age of 6, and at 10 she came to the bee and tied for 51st place. This time Charlotte was number 202, so it wouldn’t be until evening. It was just after noon and she was spending her free time studying words. She also carried a secret weapon: a happy stuffed octopus with rainbow-colored tentacles named Gregory.
“I don’t think they’ll let me take him on stage,” she said. Like other members of the family, Gregory would watch from the audience.
Harsha Dinesh, 13, of Ashburn, Virginia, had left school to spend a week at the hotel with his father, Dinesh Chandrasehar, 47. by the Potomac River, but on Tuesday afternoon the two had hidden in their hotel room, Chandrasekar was flying words and Harsha was swinging.
“Ready?” said his father. “Pale”
“Reflexology.” “Trembling” “Abuse”. “Dopamine.” “Flabbergast” Sometimes Harsha knew the word right away. Sometimes he paused.
“For bigger words, take a step back,” his father said. “Wait. Read it in your mind. Take your time.” He reminded Harsha of Braden Six, an Alabama racer that morning, who slowly, painfully, repeated question after question as the seconds went by. “He was in no hurry,” Chandrasekar said. “And he understood correctly.”
Chandrasekar has admitted that he is not Jacques Bayi, a professor of classics at the University of Vermont, who has been the official speaker at the competition since 2003 and utters every word with a vague intonation in the Midwest.
“My focus is not so great. I have a strong Indian accent, “Chandrasekar said. “I haven’t been trained here, so no matter how hard I try, even after 23 years, it will be difficult for me to pronounce it the same way people do here.”
Harsha’s favorite words are those rooted in English. The worst is French, he said. “The French scare me.”
Charlotte, who was staying at the hotel with her parents and three younger brothers, had met with spellcasters from distant places, some of whom she had befriended earlier online. By Tuesday afternoon, some of her friends had been eliminated.
“I’m really sad about that because they worked very hard,” she said. “You can know every other word in the dictionary, and if they give you a word you don’t know, that’s it.
From 2020 | The Scripps spelling bee has been canceled. So we decided to make our own.
What words do she find most difficult?
“I don’t want to annoy anything,” Charlotte said, “so I don’t want to say specifically because I might go out about it.”
On Wednesday morning, Spelers and their families posed for photos in front of a mural with bees spelled in the lobby and played with Legos placed on a large screen simultaneously broadcasting the race. On a piece of paper, the contestants wrote encouraging notes to each other: “You are all champions! “Do your best! And be calm! ”
Eighty-eight authors remained for the quarterfinals, but Harsha was not one of them: he met Waterloo the night before with the French de rigueur. leaving the first “y”. Charlotte was advanced in spelling “cataclysms” correctly. and “beekeeper and defining “governor”
At a table near Legos, three contestants in brightly patterned skirts drew pictures with colored pencils. 12-year-old Petra Sarpong, 11-year-old N’Adom Darko-Assare and 13-year-old Ani-Lois Acheampong flew in from Ghana last weekend to send spellcasters to the 15-year-old competition, sponsored by the Young Teachers’ Foundation and a non-profit organization. in Accra.
In recent years, Ghana has sent only one participant. This time, three qualified after spending nine months in virtual and personal meetings to work on spelling. “Weekends, holidays, mornings, evenings,” said Eugenia Thaci-Manson, YEF’s director of state, adding that the work has benefited beyond bees. “It helps with speaking, with literacy, with writing.
All three are native English speakers, but also know the official words for writing bees with African roots, such as “kente”, a woven cloth or “kwashiorkor”, a protein deficiency.
N’Adom and Ani-Lois were eliminated on Tuesday and Petra on Wednesday morning. The group will now have six days to rest and visit the Washington Monument, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the White House.
They had already made a pilgrimage to Starbucks.
“The whole point of their trip,” Thaci-Manson said emphatically.
“There’s just an attraction, I don’t know why,” said Annie-Lois, who attends a boarding school that probably doesn’t offer refreshing drinks with mango dragon fruit.
A wave of applause rose from the television monitor, and the girls brightened up: Charlotte had spelled “palapala” correctly.” Hawaiian writing word, becoming one of 48 contestants to qualify for the semifinals. “We’ve befriended Charlotte,” N’Adom said.
During the break, Bailly stopped at their table, and the girls jumped up to shake the speaker’s hand and take pictures with him. They talked to him about “one lege”, alternatively spelled “one legge”, which Thaci-Manson described as an African dance whose name comes from English pidgin.
“This is a trend at TikTok,” she said.
Three Ghanaian students competing in the Scripps National Spelling Bee took a break and performed One Lege, a dance from their homeland on June 1. (Video: Tara Bahrampour / The Washington Post)
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